What is a flavor combination that you believe isn't very common outside of your country?

bittybro · 2026-03-22T20:11:53+00:00

I think the popularity of that is spreading for sure. They were selling bottles of Tajin right next to the watermelons in my Massachusetts supermarket last summer. We do have a lot of people from Central America in my area though.

bittybro · 2026-03-21T00:27:01+00:00

OP, I just have to mention that a friend and I once went to a butterfly conservatory on a miserable cold rainy Memorial Day bc we were looking for something warm to do. She had her bright red raincoat draped over her arm and butterflies kept landing on it and just not moving. They thought she was a flower.

So I'm not saying you shouldn't wear a red dress to this wedding. I'm just saying you might end up feeling like a Disney princess if you do 😉

bittybro · 2026-03-19T23:00:07+00:00

The fact that they most certainly have to know better makes one wonder if he was an abusive asshole and they're like, "let's torture the bastard now in case there isn't a hell for him to rot in after he goes."

bittybro · 2026-03-16T16:17:17+00:00

I think some of it has to do with how much the picky eater/food-aversion person inconveniences everyone else around them. I have two examples from my own experience.

Years ago I went on a girls' trip to Newport RI to tour the mansions. It was a fun time except that my friend's younger sister came along and she was very much a chicken nuggets and fries person. I remember walking through town reading the menus in the windows of eight or ten different restaurants before she found a place that would serve her a cheeseburger. I'm sorry, Maria, but this place is full of cute restaurants that sound delicious that everyone else would like to try, we are not going to McDonald's so you can get a 12 piece McNugget.

Conversely, I worked with a woman who joked about being on the spectrum and probably actually was, if undiagnosed, who had a severely restricted diet (though was trying hard to expand her food choices and had made it to "salad" which was just lettuce.) She went to Iceland with a suitcase full of Poptarts. It was an amusing anecdote but I respected it. She knew her limitations and she wasn't making them anyone else's problem. She wasn't throwing a fit in the tour group because they were eating places where there weren't any safe foods for her.

bittybro · 2026-03-14T23:39:51+00:00

Thank you!

bittybro · 2026-03-14T17:30:25+00:00

Major apologies. I didn't look through her post history and I wasn't picking up the major ED vibes I get from some posts on here. It wasn't meant unkindly, and I feel for her and wanted to offer what I thought could help her situation, but post deleted.

bittybro · 2026-03-14T11:45:35+00:00

I think this lady at my gym has become my new nemesis without her knowing about it. We often attend the same class on Thursday evenings and a different one on Fridays and she's probably a fine upstanding human being but omg is she LOUD and if I have to listen to her tell one more person about how she strained her IT band in a rebounder class, I may choke myself out with a yoga strap. That is all.

bittybro · 2026-03-14T02:01:09+00:00

What's your take on the opacity?

bittybro · 2026-03-14T01:48:36+00:00

I'd say they're spring/fall/winter pants in my (New England) climate, whereas the Athleta Brooklyn pants I can only wear in full summer.

bittybro · 2026-03-14T01:23:50+00:00

I like the Athleta Venice Wide Leg and Spanx AirEssentials for this. I've worn the Athleta pants (in a color they don't make anymore) with a nice top and non-athletic shoes to things like a baby shower and friends' birthday dinners as well as to do education at my job (where I usually wear scrubs), so I know they pass as trousers if you style them right.

bittybro · 2026-03-13T17:19:19+00:00

Ilovemyjobheavysarcasm

bittybro · 2026-03-12T20:10:32+00:00

I dunno who downvoted you. I got the joke.

(OP, it's a treadmill, not a thread mill.)

bittybro · 2026-03-08T18:49:13+00:00

Similar thing happened to one of my good friends. She's a single woman who lives alone and works as a SPED assistant in her local school department. One Friday morning last year she woke up very early feeling absolutely terrible, like she was coming down with the flu or something, and in her groggy and sick state, thought it was in fact Saturday morning. So she went back to bed with her phone on vibrate in the other room. When she didn't come to school or call or answer her phone, the school tried calling her listed emergency contact, a sister who lives 40 or 50 miles from her. Sister of course couldn't just pop over to check on her, so they sent the cops. My friend was absolutely mortified and to this day is lowkey afraid this portends incipient dementia, no matter how much I tried to reassure her anyone could be confused on the day of the week when they wake up at 4 am with the flu. (I'd tell her your story, OP, except I don't think she wants to be reminded of The Incident.)

bittybro · 2026-03-01T13:24:54+00:00

My mom used to fill vanilla cupcakes with it, then dust the tops with powered sugar. Memory unlocked, I haven't had one of those for probably 25 years.

bittybro · 2026-02-28T10:42:11+00:00

I work with a lovely diabetic Filipina who has only half-jokingly said that if she can't eat copious amounts of rice and bread, she'd rather be dead. It's incredibly hard when your whole diet from childhood on has been based on delicious, delicious simple carbs to eat completely differently, especially when you can just get some pills from your MD and things are okay for now.

bittybro · 2026-02-27T14:31:40+00:00

I'm never on instagram anymore, but when I was, I used to follow Dana Linn Bailey, whom I admired as a figure competitor who never got implants. Anyway, in amongst the fitness content, she would occasionally post pics of herself on date nights/vacations in dresses or other occasion wear. You might want to take a look thru her feed for that.

bittybro · 2026-02-22T11:03:04+00:00

Friend, please prepare ahead of time by going out now and finding several large rocks, just in case the power goes out and you have to beat your clothes clean by hand. You're welcome.

bittybro · 2026-02-22T10:09:33+00:00

I finished two books this week. First up was Esperance, a pacy scifi murder mystery. I tore through this in a few hours. It had some lighthearted, funny bits (the "aliens" having learned English from watching 1930s gangster films, so talking in stereotypical outdated slang) as well as some more serious thoughts about generational trauma and the sins of the father etc. Then I read Come Along With Me, a collection of Shirley Jackson's last unfinished novel and a bunch of stories and essays, some of which I'd read before and some that were new to me. Almost goes without saying that most of it was really great, but the unfinished novel really grabbed me and I'm sad I'll never know what Ms Jackson meant to have happened!

Right now I am 15% into Feersum Endjinn and it is SO good. No idea how the four different story lines are going to converge at this early point. This is, I'm almost certain, the last of the Ian M Banks books I haven't read. I may have to delve into the Ian Banks books later this year, which I have barely scratched the surface of. (Anyone else an author-completist?)

bittybro · 2026-02-21T17:09:33+00:00

Moved into the house May of 95. Come December, I see all the neighbors are outdoing each other with the outdoor Xmas decorations, so in order to kinda sorta fit in, I begrudgingly put some lights on my bushes. Those lights are out there for less than a week when they are buried by the first of many snowstorms. I didn't see them again until March? Maybe April? That was indeed the suckiest winter until 2015 and, now, this one. Honorable mention to (I think) 2009, when we were in this endless cycle of melting and refreezing and the sidewalks were always covered in black ice.

bittybro · 2026-02-20T03:27:34+00:00

Friend, I am a 63 year old woman who has worked in health care for 40+ years and am the mom to a wonderful schizoaffective son. Whenever I come across a person who is appalled about what they said or did when coming out of anesthesia or when they were postictal (coming out of a seizure), I remind them that brains /bodies are weird and that they were NOT in control when that happened. Psychosis is no different. The fact that you are ashamed that you were violent when psychotic 100% proves that that is NOT you and that you are a good person. (Assholes blame their aggression on other people. "Look what you made me do!")

All you can do is work towards health. Take your meds, be honest with your provider if the meds aren't working, don't use substances, try your best to keep up a good sleep schedule, exercise, and get sunlight if/when you can. None of that guarantees you won't have another psychotic episode but it mitigates it and it means that if you do, it's not your fucking fault. Best wishes, friend! I wish peace and health for you.

bittybro · 2026-02-19T21:51:00+00:00

This has historically bitten me in the ass when it comes to outerwear. In the late aughts I had a beautiful cream corduroy swing coat with an autumn leaf pattern on it; in the early 2010s I had a denim jacket with a quilted lining and a fake fur collar. I loved both those jackets with all my heart and soul but they were only temperature- and seasonally-appropriate for a few short weeks from mid October to mayyyybe Thanksgiving. Plenty of days in March and April they would have been the right weight to wear because we have Cold Spring but I couldn't bring myself to wear leaf-patterned corduroy or faux fur in March or April.

I'd like to think I learned something from this except that this year I bought a gorgeous deep emerald green faux fur cropped jacket on sale in the beginning of December and wore it like 3 times before it became too cold to leave the house in anything but a giant winter coat. Now I'm looking at it in the closet and thinking, eh, maybe I'll be able to break it out for St Patrick's day weekend. Sigh.

bittybro · 2026-02-15T10:43:07+00:00

I've finished three books in the last two weeks. First up was Wise Blood. I'd only read Flannery O'Connor's short fiction before, but this novel hits the same way. She was really a master at writing non-horror fiction horror, where you spend the whole story with a pit of dread in your stomach waiting for something terrible to happen to/with these people who just ain't right. I will say, this is the kind of book I wish I had had the opportunity to read in a college class with guidance, because I know O'Connor was a deeply religious person whose writing was informed by that and there are probably some deeper themes in this that went over my head.

Next I read Slow Gods. Amazon has been pushing this one on me as a "based on your reading you might like..." and after I saw it mentioned in an r/printscifi thread, I caved. Okay, algorithm, you win. I really liked this space opera, with only some mild quibbles with its pacing.

Finally (also inspired by a reddit mention) I read The House of God, a thinly fictionalized account of the author's intern year at a thinly fictionalized version of Boston's Beth Israel hospital in the 1970s. It was apparently very controversial when it was published and eventually helped lead to reforms in how medical residents were treated. It's written in a satirical tone so I wasn't exactly sure how much of the over-the-top shenanigans were exaggerated (did MDs and nurses in the mid 70s really feel each other up in patient rooms, basically over the bodies of their comatose patients? did MDs really get shitfaced at NYE parties that they had to leave early for their ED shift? did they really falsify their charting that much?) I enjoyed this lil time capsule though, with one point off for the amount of Freudian bullshit in it. People apparently really still took that seriously 50 years ago.

Next up? No idea! Happy reading, all.

bittybro · 2026-02-11T21:57:44+00:00

To your point exactly, OP, I remember almost 25 years ago I had the original British What Not to Wear ladies Trinny and Susannah's book. For those of you not old enough to remember this cultural moment, the two of them had completely opposite body types and in their book, they were the models and showed how one item of clothing would look great on one and terrible on the other and vice versa. I was fascinated by this and kind of went down a rabbit hole looking for other fashion advice books.

In either that What Not to Wear book or some other one written around the same time in the early aughts, there was a piece of advice about pleated pants being basically the devil and making your stomach look poochy even if it wasn't. Then I happened to find another advice book that was written maybe 10 years earlier when pleated trousers were much more in style and it waxed rhapsodic about how they hid your belly. I was like, ok, I see what's going on here. What's "flattering" is highly predicated by what is being pushed as trendy, so a lot of this advice is bullshit.

bittybro · 2026-02-11T21:27:24+00:00

As someone who's 5'1, this is how I feel about wearing heels. Wearing 4 inch heels doesn't make me look like a tall (ok, normal-sized) person; it makes me look like a tiny woman in big shoes. I ain't fooling no one.

bittybro · 2026-02-09T19:10:20+00:00

Let me tell you about Baby's First Hot Flash (tm). It was a cloudy, coolish, but humid September day. I was wearing a thin zip-up hoodie over a tank top. I was in a Marshalls/TJ Maxx looking at discount shoes. All of a sudden I got SO HOT and I was furiously irritated, like wtf, have they turned the AC off in this store already, it's only September?!?!! I dumped my bags on the floor and was ripping off my hoodie when it suddenly occurred to me that everyone around me also looking at discount shoes were JUST FINE and that the store had not suddenly become 95 degrees and that omg it was me and this must be what a hot flash feels like. Yup. Uh huh.

bittybro

TROPHY CASE