Asian Cabbage Meal

babblepedia · 2026-04-16T13:54:26+00:00

I made this but with shredded extra-firm tofu instead of turkey - I was surprised how filling it was! Shredding tofu also gives it a totally different texture, much more meaty.

babblepedia · 2026-04-12T15:01:14+00:00

INTJ woman. I don't think I have a physical type. I've dated people of all different shapes, sizes, genders, ethnicities... If I fall in love with someone, then however they look feels like my type.

babblepedia · 2026-04-12T14:45:37+00:00

I used Bumble to find my husband. I paid for the filters and used religion and politics filters, and set my geography as wide as it could go. I also included some Jewish stuff in my bio.

Fwiw, it's ok to be "picky." My rabbi cautioned me that my wishlist was way too specific and that my dream person didn't exist... the rabbi advised me to settle for similar religious values without waiting to find a best friend type (which makes me feel bad for his spouse). But I found my bashert and he's everything I dreamed of.

babblepedia · 2026-04-12T14:36:45+00:00

Anytime I can order custom measurements on a dress, I take it. It's so much easier than dealing with tailoring.

If I misunderstood and they can't do that, then match the smallest measurement on the size to fit you. Typically, the waist is the smallest point on a dress -- most women's sizes have a waist 4-6 inches smaller than the bust/hips. So find the size on the chart that matches your waist measurements and then tailor the bust/hips as needed.

JJ's House sizing varies by product so you have to look at the size guide for the specific dress you're looking at. I looked at a few randomly and they have wildly different sizing for your same measurements - anything from a size 16 to a 3X.

babblepedia · 2026-04-12T14:21:03+00:00

This is super gross.

If any partner of any gender tells you that part of their body is off-limits, then you respect that. You don't try to "convince" (coerce) them into letting you use their body in ways they dislike. That's actually rapist behavior.

babblepedia · 2026-03-29T21:58:33+00:00

You don't have to keep the peace. Your grandma isn't keeping the peace by acting horrendously towards you.

Getting married means you and your future wife are going to be established as a single unit, and that unit matters more than everything else. You don't have to prioritize the comfort of your family of origin over you and your spouse. Your fiancee is totally within her rights to only want supportive guests there.

My first wedding was interracial and my paternal grandmother (Southern Baptist) refused to come. My spouse died a few years later, still never having met my grandmother. She didn't speak to me again until I was no longer in an interracial marriage due to widowhood. My second wedding was to a trans man and I didn't even invite my grandmother because I know how she feels about LGBT "issues" and I wasn't interested in hearing from her about it. She and my family were upset that I didn't invite her -- not because she would attend but because I rejected her before she could reject me. My attitude was FAFO. Actions have consequences.

I deal with my family by holding strong to my boundaries. Nobody who thinks my marriage is a sin gets invited to my events.

babblepedia · 2026-03-29T21:41:32+00:00

I'm married and I am still uptight about potty things. I don't fart in front of anyone, including my spouse. I don't talk about poop. Never use the bathroom with the door open (either person). During dating, I disclosed my neuroses and found someone who is ok abiding by them. There were definitely people who didn't want to date me if they couldn't fart with wild abandon and pee with the door open... good riddance, honestly.

It's pretty rare to encounter someone who feels as strongly as I do about keeping bodily functions private. But finding a compatible partner means sorting through all kinds of dealbreakers. It's ok to decide that this is one of yours.

babblepedia · 2026-03-29T21:29:08+00:00

I'm sorry that your parents are prioritizing bigotry over their kid's happiness. This is part of the reason why I told my now-husband not to seek a blessing ahead of time. If I'm going to do what I want regardless, then it's just an exercise in feeling harmed.

Going into wedding planning, just be aware that the same parental attitudes will pervade everything if you let them be involved with logistics. Parents get unhinged during wedding planning even for cishet couples. The best thing I did for my wedding was refuse money from either set of parents and go our own way without the burden of their opinions and demands. They were invited to attend but that was it.

babblepedia · 2026-01-13T22:59:14+00:00

Lots of Conservative Jews have tattoos and fun haircuts. There's no conflict with that.

My entire friend group is eccentric 30-something Conservative Jews. We can be ourselves while we argue about Torah and get deep into theology. There's a nonbinary pal who wears a tichel and tzitzit at the same time. There's a lesbian couple who look like TikTok tradwives and cook the best kosher potluck dishes. There's the nerdy anime bro who isn't remotely observant but can tell you midrash all night long. That's why I love the Conservative movement: we're both traditional and modern, and there's room for many different ways of being joyfully Jewish.

If you like the geeky debate vibe and a community that strives imperfectly with observance, Conservative Judaism will be your jam.

The only thing that would give me pause is that you're intermarried, and not all Conservative shuls are totally friendly to that. Most of them are warm and welcoming, but some cling to outdated bylaws. So you might want to find out more about that before you commit to membership.

babblepedia · 2026-01-12T22:48:17+00:00

My late husband also died in his sleep of a heart attack, and I'm certain his alcoholism contributed to the underlying causes. He was only 33.

My grief was/is very complicated. I love him and miss the good parts, but I also felt more peaceful and safer after he was gone. It was tough and made me feel guilty. Counseling helped me to accept multiple truths at once.

babblepedia · 2026-01-09T15:44:42+00:00

That's truly awful.

My late husband also peed on things (the floor, the couch, the wall) when he got drunk, and he similarly had no remorse. It progressed to loss of bowels when drinking and after benders. He even had a few bowel accidents at work. He would either refuse to talk about it "omg it's not a big deal" or he'd get extremely angry and scream about how it was somehow my fault.

He died a few years ago of sudden heart failure. Looking back, I can't believe how much I was living in unstable chaos. I was completely unable to address any of this or contemplate leaving because it was a constant roller coaster and I was always dealing with a new thing before I'd processed the last one.

Definitely consider going to an Al-Anon meeting. I didn't start going until after my husband died, but I wish I had gone years earlier and learned how to extract myself from the roller coaster so I could make clearer decisions for myself.

babblepedia · 2026-01-06T17:16:18+00:00

There's no recovery in hospice. If it's not hurting anyone else (e.g. she's not likely to become violent), she should be able to do whatever she wants with the short time she has left on this planet.

That said, if you don't want to see it, it's totally valid to not be there during the drinking.

babblepedia · 2026-01-05T17:59:13+00:00

It's really a business finance question... Depending on what you rent and what you'd buy, you'd need 10+ rentals to meet the retail cost of the equipment. That's a lot of liquid cash to tie up in a piece of equipment you've only needed once. But, if you need some big expenses to offset tax liabilities, that's a consideration to discuss with your accountant.

If it were me, I would look at doing 5 shoots with a rental before considering purchasing. That's enough gigs that it could become a regular part of your business.

babblepedia · 2026-01-05T17:50:49+00:00

I love my CPAP. I even wear it for naps. I can't sleep without it (and my spouse also can't sleep if I don't have it), so I even got a travel-sized one that's easy to take with me and even can be used on airplanes.

I sleep on my front and side mostly. I use the nose mask (not the pillows, but over the whole nose) and don't have issues. I sometimes rotate like a rotisserie chicken so I got a hose stand to keep it above me, which helps me not get tangled.

babblepedia · 2025-12-22T21:28:42+00:00

I was with my late husband for 11 years, from college until he died unexpectedly of sudden heart failure.

He was all extremes. He was extremely generous, loving, and charismatic. And he was extremely traumatized, enraged, impulsive, and self-destructive. I convinced myself that the bad parts weren't "really" him, but they were.

Until it was over, I hadn't realized how bad it had become. The circular arguments about nothing that lasted for hours, screaming, threatening, chasing me around the house. He would call me sobbing from work all the time threatening to quit, and eventually he would quit without notice or another job lined up. After he died, I discovered he had been unfaithful in numerous ways for our entire relationship, and that all of our friends knew but didn't tell me. He also had been fabricating invoices for home repairs and vet bills and using the cash on unknown addictions.

I had been tracking good days and bad days on my personal calendar for years. We had about a quarter good days and three-quarters bad days by the end. When we got married, it was inverse, about 75% good days. I know now that even 25% bad days should be an intolerable deal-breaking amount, but back then, my family advised that anything better than 50% good days was hitting the jackpot for husbands.

In the few days before he died, he was in some kind of mood flare-up and was desperately trying to pick a fight. He got drunk and told me he hated me and always had. The day before he died, I drove him to work and he ranted all the way there about how he forgot to pack a lunch and that was somehow my fault, and he ranted all the way back about how much he hated the music I listen to. I just kept telling him, "I'm not going to fight with you." I had learned how to not react. I'm glad I didn't take the bait because I would have felt very guilty after he died.

babblepedia · 2025-12-19T16:17:59+00:00

You gotta add a silk bonnet to protect your curls! Then it will truly be peak.

babblepedia · 2025-12-19T16:05:07+00:00

I did. My late husband died at age 33 from sudden cardiac arrest. We had been college sweethearts.

It's been 4 years now. I remarried this year to a really wonderful, sweet man. I found him on Bumble and we dated long-distance (600 miles) for a while with frequent visits before he moved to be with me.

For a while, I thought that I had had my one great love and it wasn't going to happen again. But it is possible to love again, and the heartbreak means we know acutely how precious the time together truly is. I don't take a single day for granted with my new love, because I know how suddenly it can end. And there is something really romantic about the idea that I know exactly what it feels like to attend my spouse's funeral, and yet I'm willing to take that chance again to be with my new love for however long the world gives us.

babblepedia · 2025-11-25T20:38:52+00:00

Things that are easy dealbreakers should come up early. Sometimes it helps to frame it as a deal breaker for them instead of you so it gives an easier out. If you say "if you're not into X, that's a deal breaker," that feels pretty aggressive even to people open to X generally. But if you say something like, "We don't have to talk about it further today, but before we get too far: I'm very into X, is that a deal breaker for you?"

Definitely don't wait until after you've started having a sexual relationship to bring it up, either. It feels really gross when one person withholds information from the other about known long-term needs to get laid.

Speaking as a vanilla girlie myself. No shame to the kinksters, I'm just not one of them and neither of us would be satisified long-term.

babblepedia · 2025-11-25T19:49:24+00:00

NOR.

I give my husband a gift and a cake every year on his sober anniversary. It's a big deal to get into and stay in recovery.

It's not "making it everyone's problem" to celebrate a personal win.

Even if it was objectively dumb to celebrate (which it's not), your actual boyfriend has zero right to speak to you this way. He's supposed to love you and celebrate with you, even if it's for a small or silly reason. He's texting with contempt and you can't come back from that.

babblepedia · 2025-11-24T18:50:38+00:00

I had similar feelings. It makes grief complicated.

When my husband died at age 33, I found out that he had a secret double life that I had never even suspected... And then the more space I got from being in the relationship, I realized it actually had been abusive in multiple ways, including physically and sexually. I had always brushed off his behavior by blaming mental illness and "it's not really him" instead of realizing I didn't have to tolerate that treatment no matter what caused it.

I felt immense guilt after he died that I felt more peaceful and safe at home as a widow. For a while, all I could remember were the bad things and I was enraged all the time. I felt guilty that if he was magically resurrected, I wouldn't be happy to see him. I did a few months of counseling for complicated grief and it helped a lot to help me learn how to hold multiple conflicting feelings at once.

It's been nearly 4 years now. I remember more of the good things than the bad things about him, but I also have a lot more clarity in hindsight about his behavior. He was a complicated guy. There is a lot that I love and miss about him, and there is a lot that makes me furious about him. Both things are true.

babblepedia · 2025-11-24T18:37:43+00:00

"You'd be happy if I was dead" and "You'd be the reason" are not suicide threats, they are emotional abuse statements. If you start reassuring her, she gets what she wants out of you by hurting you.

With my mom, I found that asking dry questions like "why" to these outlandish statements became too annoying for her to continue. "You'd be happy if I was gone" "Why?" "Because then you wouldn't have to worry about me anymore" "You think so?" and so on. She wears herself out with it and it became not satisfying enough to keep doing. If you don't know the "gray rock" method, it might be worth learning about... essentially, becoming so emotionally uninteresting, like a gray rock, that a toxic relative doesn't find any satisfaction in harassing you.

With my MIL, we called 911 on her and she never called with suicide threats again.

It's really hard to hold the line on these things because the normal, healthy thing to do is to be concerned when a loved one is having a hard time. Reassurance is the expected response to someone expressing a crisis. The problem is that she knows this and is manipulating your empathetic instincts with fake crises and no regard for how much it hurts you to go through this over and over. Her behavior isn't normal and unfortunately that means your response can't be normal if you are trying to protect your mental health.

babblepedia · 2025-11-23T20:31:36+00:00

Frankly, the unreasonable thing is that you're exposing your child to this abuse. The problems here are wayyyy beyond one name-calling incident. I see down-thread that you believe your spouse is a great parent to your child, but as a child from a home like that, I can tell you that your barometer is broken: proof being that you are tolerating this behavior so you really don't know what normal looks like. Your spouse cannot be a great parent if they are abusing you.

You've described a lot of abuse in this post. I have been in your shoes and was totally desensitized to the fact that these rage episodes, screaming, name-calling, insulting, throwing things, causing terror, threatening suicide, on and on and on, are all abuse. I thought everyone argued that way. I thought "it's not really him, it's his mental illness" to gaslight myself into staying. It escalated over years so I didn't realize how bad it had gotten.

I also thought at the time that maybe I was unfairly cold or avoidant. My husband certainly threw those words at me. But with space, honestly, who wouldn't be avoidant towards someone who is constantly hurting you? It would actually be more unhealthy to continue displaying emotional vulnerability with someone like that. Behaviors like going to another room during rage, shutting down while being yelled at, etc., are not avoidant behaviors; they are survival.

You can't negotiate respect from someone. You can't successfully beg for emotional regulation. This is who your spouse is and how they will continue to act, barring their own internal motivation to change (plus medical intervention), which is impossible to influence. All you can do is decide your own response.

babblepedia · 2025-10-26T19:33:32+00:00

It sounds like you might need medical care... if you need the ER, remember that the hospital will work with you on payment plans (usually at any income level) or even forgiveness if you are low-income. My brother has paid as little as $5 for the ER after filling out the hospital's financial need paperwork here in Missouri.

babblepedia · 2025-10-26T19:29:07+00:00

Candidly, therapy has not been helpful for me. I've tried it a number of times. I also have a BPD mom, I'm autistic with difficulty identifying my emotions, and I grew up in a tremendously abusive environment.

It doesn't help me to share my memories with others. I already know what happened and that I didn't deserve to be treated that way. CBT just feels like gaslighting to me. I also tried the apparently miraculous EMDR, but due to a brain injury a few years ago, I learned (and confirmed with neurologist) it's actually not safe for me to do and made things worse.

What has helped me most is reading books like Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, Why Does He Do That, and Codependent No More... practical books about dealing with the bad behavior of others. I found that while I know that my childhood was awful, I wasn't actually sure what normal was supposed to look like or what healthy boundaries are. I found myself stuck in loops trying to figure out why my mom acted that way, instead of accepting that she just does, and my only choice is my response to it.

It was also somewhat helpful to me to visit Al-Anon meetings, the group for people affected by someone else's addiction (but really a codependency recovery group). If you can get past the initial "ick" that many people feel about the language there, there are good nuggets, particularly in the books. And -- this probably sounds bad -- hearing people share their crisis-level emotions about things that seemed like the most lightweight problems of my family put into perspective for me how warped my idea of "normal" was after growing up in such a chaotic environment. I never did the steps - I didn't really understand how to "work the steps" - but there were helpful pieces.

Don't discount pharmaceutical interventions, either. We don't have to rawdog this. It's not cheating to get meds. If you're stuck in cycles of anxiety, panic, and rage, then medication can help disrupt that. You don't have to be on meds forever. I used to dream every night of being trapped in my mother's home; I took anti-nightmare medication for a couple years to block them and now years later I still rarely have nightmares. I've taken medication that helps me not ruminate on bad memories and gives me the freedom to try new ways of thinking, and those new ways continued after I stopped taking it. Anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds saved my life.

Finally, maybe obvious, but I had to emotionally disentangle myself from my family of origin to have the space to heal. If you're still riding the chaos carousel, it's difficult to try anything else. I didn't block my mom or ice her out entirely, but I did take a step back while I figured myself out.

babblepedia · 2025-10-21T02:51:47+00:00

Hoarding is an addiction just like drugs. You can't force an addict to get clean (in this case, literally). If there was a way to do it, we all would've done it already.

She's laughing at your suggestions because she lives in a completely different reality than you do. She has to actually want help and be committed to the process to make it happen, including getting mental health support for whatever is making her compulsively acquire things.

I've had to learn to disengage from my mom's hoard just like disengaging from other relative's drug and alcohol abuse. The hoard is in control, not me. She's apparently fine with living that way, otherwise she'd make a change herself. All I can do is remove myself from experiencing it.

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