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It feels amazing. Awe inspiring. The best thing I have ever done.

I took Spanish in school growing up but never got anywhere. Then I lived in Uruguay after graduating from college and got more or less fluent. Then I continued maintaining and improving it. I can do more or less everything you'd want to do, but my literary vocabulary is weak.

I started learning mandarin at 28 (I'm not 32), and ended up moving to China to continue studying, though I... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by wooh at 8:29 PM on April 24, 2020

I am like you and I am a scanner! Thanks so much to Barbara Sher for showing me this was a good thing.

I embrace dabbling...I love that overwhelming obsession with a new Thing, researching, acquiring the bits and bobs to make or do the Thing, doing the Thing then as the obsession eases, I pack away the bits and bobs and move on to the next Thing.

I know that this is what I do, so I try not to invest too much time/money in a new Thing up front.... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by eloeth-starr at 10:39 PM on January 29, 2019

You might like this latest essay from Samantha Irby which is about saying that you like things to other people who say they don’t like those things.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by pinkacademic at 10:31 AM on May 14, 2023

Two techniques, used together, enabled me to get my novel written.

First, I stopped worrying about the times that my past self had let me down by failing to write it. Instead, I started thinking about my future self, and how I was going to give him the amazing present of being the author of a published novel.

Second, I broke a massive and intimidating task down into specific, concrete, achievable, daily goals.... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by yankeefog at 6:33 AM on August 16, 2015 marked best answer

The most important thing I've learned is that actions beget feelings. It's very easy to look at what we don't have and think "How can I change my feelings so that I act so that I can achieve this?" but that's the wrong way around. You want this awesome life, but are afraid that you don't have the right feelings -- confidence, positivity, whatever -- to make it happen.

But that way of thinking has the causality in the wrong direction. The way... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by forza at 8:54 PM on November 20, 2018

*I don't know the dosage of Oxycodone that Van just took; when I was on Oxy, they just gave me a jug of it and trusted me not to go buckwild. (This is a dangerous proposition, because the more Oxy you take, the more Oxy you feel okay taking.) However, if she took...um...a good size dose of it, she's not going anywhere, Evil Tai. Sorry.

*The "Mother" music cue made me bust out laughing. Oh, Danzig. Never not funny. I realize he's from the same era as the '90s... [more]
posted to FanFare by kittens for breakfast at 10:40 PM on April 21, 2023

I relate very much to this question! I am a researcher/planner. I also seem to add new interests every year without ever getting tired of the old ones. A few notions that come up for me when I think about managing them:
- From the idea of exercise habits, where people do "leg day" and "rest day," but applied to my interests: read news on Sunday, weight lift on Monday, yoga on Tuesday, podcasts only while driving, cooking new things only in winter, etc.... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by xo at 7:53 AM on April 7, 2023

I have a high school diploma, a spinal cord injury and progressive degenerative spinal disorder, and my 10th novel will be published in 2019. My second anthology will be published in 2018. I wrote two non-fiction books for tweens. I repeat: I have a high school diploma. I have never had beta readers; I've never been in a writers' group. All you need is an idea and the will to write a novel.

I tell you all this because I have often felt like, oh, I bet people with MFAs... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by headspace at 8:55 AM on November 24, 2017 marked best answer

I would suggest you live by the motto: "Say it and move on."

"Say it" means you say out loud the reaction you are having in that moment. You don't overstate it, you don't softshoe it, you don't drop a hint, nor throw a tantrum. You say the thing directly. Like, "Hey, that's not a nice thing to say," or "Yo, that's passive aggressive," or "Dude, come on, not now, let's focus on having fun?" or... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by MiraK at 2:02 PM on January 11, 2023 marked best answer

Our new pet theory is that the "big secret" the girls are hiding isn't cannibalism -- it's that they made a human sacrifice (Shauna's baby) in the explicit hope that it would appease the weird eyeless man-spirit in the woods and allow them to finally get rescued. Then, everyone swore to never mention Shauna's sacrificial baby once they got back to civilization for obvious reasons, including hiding the baby's existence from Jeff.

Think about it:... [more]
posted to FanFare by Unicorn on the cob at 11:09 AM on April 3, 2023

Had an absolutely great time in my 20s in Shimokitizawa – a wonderful place for vintage clothing and a general cool hanging out vibe, so I would heartily second that recommendation. It's a little way out of central Tokyo, but well worth the trip.

I'd also recommend Naka-Meguro, too, for a similar feel.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Ella_Bella at 4:54 PM on March 13, 2023

Shimokitazawa
posted to Ask MetaFilter by bluecore at 10:51 AM on March 13, 2023

Oh goodness. I didn't know she'd passed. She came to my graduate writing program and gave a talk/workshop back in 2004 or 2005, and then I went and did one of her weekend writing workshops at her house some years later. Everyone else dropped out so it was just me and her, and her partner Philip, and their dog, Hector.

She taught me how to make caponata and her typewriter was missing a couple keys -- so she'd just started composing poems without those letters. I ended up... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by heyitsgogi at 10:30 AM on March 6, 2023

This is such a great question. I am torn between the urge to read everyone's responses carefully before adding mine and the powerful wish to add my own. Barthes was all "the banality of lists" but whatever, I love lists, call me bourgeois.

I would co-sign most of the re-read rationales above - comfort, immersiveness, approaching a complex book many times over the years as I change.

I'd add that rereading books can bring back my... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Frowner at 10:26 AM on May 10, 2021

I've visited maybe a dozen or so temples on the route in Shikoku, but most of this was getting around by train with some walking mixed in. The plan was a short trip around Shikoku with the temples being points of interest. Most of the people you see at the temples will be on bus tours or a couple of people walking between close together temples. I agree that the temples themselves aren't too impressive but that's not the point.

Another option instead of the Shikoku 88... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by any portmanteau in a storm at 8:09 AM on February 21, 2023

Look, this stuff is hard.

But what stands out to me in your post is that you seem really focused on your kid not being smart enough (particularly not smart enough not to get caught). And you seem to be focused on social media rewiring his brain.

If this were my kid, I’d be worried about what he’s feeling, where he’s getting (or learning to develop) his self-worth, how he experiences his friendships, what’s going on with him.... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by warriorqueen at 3:58 AM on February 21, 2023

So a few things.

One is, it's a really fixed mindset to go like this:
- I worked really hard
- I tried my best (both of which are fair statements) to
- therefore, this work/present/etc. represents The Best and people should just accept it to
- and if they critique it or make a negative remark they are passing judgement and I should be ashamed

A growth mindset would look at it more like:... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by warriorqueen at 5:42 PM on October 24, 2019

Ursula K LeGuin "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" paired with the response
N.K. Jemisin "The Ones Who Stay and Fight" - both classic stories from excellent, award-winning writers. They're under ten pages together and I'd love to talk about them with high schoolers.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by momus_window at 4:14 PM on February 15, 2023

I do support for health care IT applications. I've had various jobs but I've worked at the same hospital (after a couple mergers) for about 28 years now. Back when I was working at Burger King, and into my years as a field service computer tech, I used to think having a desk job was The Dream. I'd know I made it when all I had to do was sit in front of a computer all day and do computer stuff.

I'll tell ya, it's not all it's cracked up to be. My job pays the bills. If I... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by bondcliff at 12:34 PM on October 29, 2022

What works for me is that I've been burned so badly so many times in my life that I finally am more anxious about letting my anxieties control me than I am about whatever I was anxious about in the first place. I now see anxiety as a sign that I should charge in and do the thing before the anxiety snowballs and destroys my entire life yet again.

It works about half the time.

Anxiety is fucking hard.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 11:57 AM on February 22, 2019

My usual weapon of choice for this job is the excellent yt-dlp (itself a fork of the excellent but less frequently updated youtube-dl) but if you're less than happy with command line tools then installing the Video DownloadHelper browser extension and its companion app works well too.

yt-dlp is currently doing a better job of working around YouTube's age gate than the others.

All three are free.... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by flabdablet at 12:47 PM on February 10, 2022

This is just implementing an early model, alpha-release of government, invented in the eighteenth century - the mutual aid society.

This is a rather ahistorical view, considering governments (including those providing some form of social welfare) date back a few thousand years before this.

I don't think we're ever going to reach a point where short-term/one-time needs aren't often met by informal social networks and families... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 10:20 AM on January 31, 2022

I think the point is not that OP expects friend not to read her posts, but that OP didn't expect friend to figure out that [username] was in fact her friend starstarstar and that having figured that out, that the friend wouldn't then read all starstarstar's posts and learn more about her and her life than OP had chosen to share with her. I wouldn't like this either. I mean it's one thing to have your friends know your username on a forum and you know they know it and you post knowing that your... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by If only I had a penguin... at 8:19 AM on January 27, 2022 marked best answer

That sex is a conversation between bodies and not something one person gets from the other person in a rote way. I know this isn't a black and white thing with cishet people operating one way and queer people the other, but broadly I think queerness, as well as sex that is often not going to be quite "tab A into slot B," nudges people to a more holistic view.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by needs more cowbell at 11:25 AM on January 18, 2022 marked best answer

Being friends with people after you dated or hooked up, and just in general having close friends who are in the gender category(ies) you would date, and this not being a huge problem for your partner. Like, if gay people acted the way that straight people do — so many rules about who their partner can be friends with, constant suspicion that any opposite-gender friend means they're cheating — none of us would have any friends at all. I even see it in a lot of the answers on... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by 100kb at 11:24 AM on January 18, 2022

Libertarians in the US are different from Anarchists in that they usually believe "the market" is the way to level playing fields and get things to work out. So you don't need environmental regulations because better companies will naturally achieve more market share blabity bla. I am handwaving broadly but the difference between the hands-offness of Anarchism and the hands-offness of Libertarianism is that Anarchism isn't anti-governance, it's anti-governance from without and often... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by jessamyn at 10:19 AM on April 18, 2017 marked best answer

When I am feeling despair about the big things I find it helpful to take solace in the small things. A tree outside my window. The fact that I have a soft place to lie down, and clean water to drink. Keeping it real and in the moment can be comforting when the entirety of the arc of my life is to huge and overwhelming and at that moment to sad to deal with. The small things can be very comforting.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Winnie the Proust at 4:28 PM on January 14, 2022

I'm right there with ya, honey. Decades of lousy health, fascists on the march, flat on my ass and wondering how the hell to go on. Oy, this life.

It's essential to have goals, and human connection. Focus on getting things done that will matter to you. Try to resist the little tiny gratifications that will scratch the itch without treating the rash. I'm thinking of a Youtuber who did a video about how he hadn't uploaded anything for many months because he'd been in a... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Ursula Hitler at 4:00 PM on January 14, 2022

I try to walk the dog three times a day and make the walk my deadline for finishing a task. I also have started writing down, by hand, every little thing I do at work. It’s rewarding enough to pull me along on some (not all) days. It is just such a struggle.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by HotToddy at 4:30 PM on January 11, 2022

I don't have time to post a more thoughtful answer, but do want to challenge your perspective a bit. Typed fast between meetings, please forgive the rough edges.

1. You're not "an old" you're super fucking smart and have broad interests and flexible perspective and are capable of reflection and growth. I know this because while I mostly lurk around here, I read your answers / posts here word-for-word entirely and you've earned a credibility with me (and plenty... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by everythings_interrelated at 7:57 AM on January 6, 2022

In 2010 I moved to Budapest, not knowing any Hungarian, and not knowing any Hungarians. I was stoked, and did end up enjoying it (mostly), but on the very first night, alone in my new apartment on Dohány street, my anticipation and exhilaration shrank into a feeling of imposing loneliness and anxiety, directly related to being in the middle of a huge and unknown city, so intimidatingly real... My apartment didn't have an internet connection, which makes everything more intense.... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by mbrock at 8:36 AM on December 26, 2015

Before answering this question, I looked through your post history. I recognize some of your previous questions, many of which seem to have a recurring theme. You have a strong external locus of control — you're overly concerned with people and events you cannot influence. I can tell you that people with internal locuses (loci?) of control are happier — because they are — but that doesn't really help you. It's not really actionable.

Instead, I'll... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by jdroth at 12:12 PM on December 5, 2021 marked best answer

Not threadsitting, but want to greatly thank lunasol and DirtyOldTown for bringing up the specificities and nuances of LGBT population! Definitely relevant and helpful.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by nancynickerson at 6:19 PM on December 4, 2021

I've lived in SMA for almost a year. It's not very walkable and the expat community is mostly older, white, USian, and wealthy. Not my thing. It's also not terribly close to any airports and most of the local cultural centers that might otherwise make it interesting are still shut down or operating on reduced schedules.

The city has been ok as a coronabunker, but if I were to stay in Mexico past next January (I'm not, and feel free to DM me as to why), I'd be moving on.... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Sheydem-tants at 1:27 PM on December 3, 2021 marked best answer

Oaxaca has an amazing visual-arts culture and a small queer scene! Also, the food is amazing.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by sixswitch at 9:20 AM on December 3, 2021 marked best answer

Not even a decade old, but a classic all the same.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by shadygrove at 6:49 PM on November 28, 2021

I procrastinate too, sometimes out of fear of not doing something perfectly. I learned about this exercise, which is cool:

Think about something you are procrastinating about, and draw a line down the middle of a piece of paper to split it into two columns. On the left side, write down on a scale of 1-10 how hard you think the task/job will be. (If you are anxious or a perfectionist, the number will probably be irrationally high.) Then, commit to working on the task for... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by shortyJBot at 5:17 PM on December 8, 2011 marked best answer

Lately I've been telling myself that the honorable thing to do is go down with the ship -- meaning, if I'm going to fail, I'm going to fail in the biggest, most humiliating way possible, and stay with the project 100% right up until the big humiliating failure occurs.

It sort of works, sometimes. It works better than other shit worked on this issue for me in the past. It takes "zomg run away" off the table, and it makes even small victories seem pretty... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by nebulawindphone at 4:14 PM on December 8, 2011

Well, Chumbawamba's Tubthumping was about quite a lot, apparently.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by BlahLaLa at 1:10 PM on November 19, 2021

Mine is sort of a halfway. Comes out closer to sen-chient.

From US south, but don’t have a southern accent.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by thivaia at 4:59 AM on November 18, 2021

It sounds like you're worried that in order to hang out with these "really cool people doing some really cool things" you also must be really cool in the exact same way/degree.

A side note on that topic that is probably not relevant here: one thing I've learned living in a town with a very vibrant local music scene for a number of years, and being someone who enjoys live music quite a lot but hasn't spent the time to get good at any... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by eviemath at 11:52 AM on July 1, 2021

William Labov did some great studies of everyday story-telling that for me yielded useful information about story-telling, funny or not.

Some basic points are that everyday stories typically begin with a clause that sort of encapsulates the whole story, indicating to your audience that you're taking the floor for a minute to talk about how "One time I got in a wreck and almost got killed," and then a story should conclude with a coda (often a vacuous "And... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Monsieur Caution at 1:00 AM on December 24, 2012 marked best answer

It doesn't quite fit (particularly the part about anyone being proud of it), but it's possible you are thinking of N. K. Jemisin's The Ones Who Stay and Fight (which I only recently learned is a response to Ursula K. Le Guin's The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas).
posted to Ask MetaFilter by solotoro at 11:33 AM on November 18, 2021

Just as a data point, your husband actually sounds like a pretty heavy drinker to me. That's not a judgement, just an obervation.

I think you're gaslighting yourself, both about how much he drinks, and about how you feel about it.
He drinks a lot. You don't like it. Both of these statements are true and okay.

It's okay to have a feeling that's not 100% perfectly fair and explainable by some external metric (ie, whether he is an... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by nouvelle-personne at 12:44 PM on November 14, 2021

Wow you trained yourself to do 50 burpees a day?? That's amazing!! So much willpower!

So there was this quote that came to mind [ cheesy trigger warning haha ]...
When I was a young man,
I wanted to change the world.
I found it was difficult to change the world,
so I tried to change my nation.
When I found I couldn't change the nation,
I began to focus on my town.
I couldn't change... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Crookshanks_Meow at 8:34 PM on November 6, 2016

Build social bonds. Invite people to lunch -- or invite two other people to lunch, and you can introduce them to each other -- and work on throwing the occasional gathering:

- practice recipes that would be good for social events;
- gradually start befriending people around you and slowly work up to going to lunch or inviting them to dinner;
- notice what works for you and what doesn't so you can eventually mentor others;
- figure out... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by amtho at 7:31 PM on November 6, 2016

It sounds like the relationships you've been in so far have been something that you just sort of let happen to you. You hooked up. It was nice so you let the hookups continue. You seemed compatible so you let it become a relationship. Nothing was terribly wrong so you let the relationship go on.

I think regardless of what you do, you should stop doing that. If the best thing you can say about someone is that there's no good reason to leave them,... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by nebulawindphone at 10:55 AM on November 11, 2021

This internet stranger would literally, no exaggeration, end a relationship over this.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by aspersioncast at 9:23 PM on November 10, 2021

I've been thinking about some people living macro lives and others living micro lives. What I mean is macro people want to travel the world, have adventures and seek novelty, live in various big cities. they want to see or experience it all! they zoom out.

Micro people seek to experience quite a lot, but instead they zoom in. They want to be involved deeply with their one community, or their art, and domestic life. they have just as much meaning as the macro people, but... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by wellifyouinsist at 6:59 AM on March 6, 2020

I am an existentialist. I believe that I create my own meaning in life. This belief is important to me because, by the standards of the capitalist society in which I live, my life is not meaningful, given that I currently don’t work and am housebound due to disability. But my life is generally happy and fulfilling because I find my meaning in kindness given and received, and that includes extending to myself the same kindness I give others. I’m always with myself, so I always have the... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Ruki at 6:11 PM on November 11, 2019