(I lived.)

Phew Thank you for that closure.

To any prospective and new parents stumbling onto this thread: Turn back. NOW.

This thread will give you nightmare fuel. You have been warned.

I accidentally slammed my picky toe into a corner once and I’m pretty sure I broke it. But I was scared to tell my parents, so I just wore socks around the house until it healed.

I don’t think it healed properly either. If I feel the edges of my picky toes, I can feel a difference between my right and left. Using standard anatomical terms of location for clarity, the toe that got injured has a pointier joint on the medial edge, with the distal bone of the pinky turning slightly more laterally than the uninjured toe bone does. It doesn’t hurt today and doesn’t cause me any issues, as far as I can tell.

It still sucks that I’m not the only one who felt the need to hide an injury as a child.

I know you don’t want to hear “it depends,” but there is no one rule that would cover all art. Some art is made to communicate specific ideas. Some art is made simply out of self-expression, without intent for any particular audience. Both are valid.

If I doodle in my notebook, it’s for the artist (me.) However, I also draw and paint to communicate specific emotions. I made a painting while listening to “September” by Earth, Wind and Fire, with the intent to capture the energy and joy the song sends through me. I don’t expect anyone to immediately connect the image with the specific song, but since it’s a lively concert scene, my hope is that the emotion that inspired the art comes across to an audience.

Sometimes I’ll make something more abstract, intentionally left open to interpretation. I may have my own thoughts about such pieces, but ultimately I want the viewer to find their own meaning.

In reality, everything is up to the audience. There will always be people who interpret things in their own way, independent of the artist’s intentions. We can’t control what others will think, but learning to tolerate and/or accept people who “don’t get it” is a stage all artists have to go through. I’ve come to accept that there is no one perfect mode of communication, so if I intend to communicate something specific, it’s on me as the artist to put effort into making that message clear.

UTIs (urinary tract infections) really fuck with people experiencing dementia. Sometimes the way a person acts under a UTI is the first sign of such cognitive decline. They’ll be fine one day, but when infection sets in it’s like they become another person.

However, that’s for people who ordinarily have self-control. For Trump, it’s anyone’s guess.

Make sure the parade weaves back and forth through some of the gaps in the Texas/Mexico border wall.

My middle school held an assembly over a fad of “dick tapping” that had taken over the boys in the school. Apparently it had become “a thing” for them to just reach over and slap their friends’ penises, and it got so bad that we needed a damn assembly.

All us girls were extremely confused. We legit thought most of the boys in our school must have secretly been gay if they wanted to touch each other’s dicks so badly. Even if the boys weren’t gay, we figured they must be pretty frickin’ stupid to play such a dumb “game.” A lot of us had crushes evaporate in an instant, and I for one never looked at the boys in my class the same again.

Nowadays, I know better than to assume one’s sexuality from such things. However, I never stopped being extremely confused about that game.

Wild, I’ve lived in the US my whole life and never heard that. Interesting.

Umm. I’m sorry, but it looks like we’ve got a misunderstanding? I’d simply never heard the word “billion” shortened to “billy” before, and I was asking where you got that term from. (Though now I’m even more curious what you thought I was asking.)

I can only imagine how many foreign-born lawyers exist among their alumni, who care personally enough about this matter to fight pro-bono.

50 Billy

I’m curious. Is this a new term, a thing Australians say, a reference from some media I missed, or just something that’s fun to say?

He did leave as an utter failure - not because of what he accomplished or didn’t accomplish, but because he was already an utter failure of a human being the day he arrived in the White House.

I thought it was a joke about the software making work much less efficient?

Yesterday I drove into my home town, where I grew up. It’s been hard to go there since MAGA erupted. In a usually-blue state, my home town (and the surrounding area) goes deep red. I wish I could say it was inexplicable, but I grew up around these people - their current authoritarian boot-licking matches up with everything I always knew about them.

How wonderful this news could’ve been to hear on the TV 12 hours ago, when I was back in that town, sitting in a waiting room. There was only one other person in the room, a middle-aged white guy who kept loudly saying things in response to the news on the TV. I’m pretty sure he was just trying to chat with someone, but I know how easy it is to accidentally set some people off, and I’m not about to make small talk about the news with a stranger in that town.

So I ignored him. He kept making unsolicited commentary. I kept reading my phone. Thankfully, someone eventually entered the room with a dog, and that gave the man a chance to start a conversation about the good boi, which the dog’s owner happily obliged. But now I wonder what he would have said if this story had been on the news at that time. It might have actually been entertaining.

I imagining a mix of grunge and Red Hot Chili Peppers. Not sure how that would work, but I’m sure you’d find a way to rock it.

I don’t know about that, I’ll be fine until someone with no comprehension of “right of way” nearly kills me. Those moments usually create a string of angry swears that would make a sailor proud.

I feel you. I have to keep reminding myself that a lot of my anxiety isn’t mine - it’s my mom’s. I just inherited the behaviors that she picked up, that in turn were created in reaction to my (long-gone) toxic grandfather’s abuse.

Generational trauma probably lurks behind all of us, deeprooted and insidious, propping up maladaptive behaviors that go unexamined simply because they are considered “normal” in our families.

My sapphic brain wasn’t tuned to understand that quote properly at first. Instead of seeing an insult, I thought, “Wow, that sounds like a busy, but amazing, morning.”

At least he is married to a man. All Melania has is a geriatric toddler.

“Tapping me along” made me imagine someone tapping a golf ball. Nudging it, but not making a big swing, it could be indicative of a subtle influence.

Trump may not know a lot about a lot, but he spends enough time golfing to potentially use a metaphor from it. On the other hand, I’ve never golfed (except the mini kind), so I could be way off.