morgan423

With jobs, it’s just the job market right now. Companies aren’t interested in keeping good relations with applicants. Expect to just never hear back on a significant number of your applications.

A little old school here, but Tom Petty and the HB were always fantastic live, I got to catch them several times.

I also once was socially-dragged to a Sheryl Crow concert at the Ryman, and even though she’s not usually my thing, that show was fantastic. She had a bunch of folks from the Nashville Symphony Orchestra playing with her band that night, and I’ve never seen a group of classical musicians have so much fun. They really made it an unbelievable show. If you’re ever there and can catch ANYTHING at the Ryman, do it… the acoustics are absolutely insane.

My favorite concert story was that we went to a “Best of the 80s” concert in Indiana in the late 90s when I was a teen (bands that performed included Wang Chung, A Flock of Seagulls, and a few one-hit wonders I’m struggling to remember right now). At the end, the promoters took the mic and apologized to everyone that the show was ending a little early, the closing band, Missing Persons, couldn’t make it. My friends and family I was there with laughed our asses off the entire way out of the arena, but it didn’t seem like a single other person there got it.

If you’re doing them, any time before the deadline from here is fine.

If you’ve got complex stuff going on and are using a tax service or accountant, I’d say the best window is the back half of February through the first half of March. This misses all the people on the front end who rush to get them done the femtosecond they have all of their documents, and also misses the people on the back end scrambling for THE late-season rush.

You could argue that no one is ever truly remembered. Even people who are mentioned in history books and have their specific deeds remembered and preserved…

…within a couple of hundred years, there are no other humans left alive anywhere on the planet who personally knew said famous person. No one who knew them on any personal level, any more deeply that the handful of cold facts written down about them on record.

We are meant to be forgotten. Just another thing we have to come to terms with regarding our existence.

I like it as an idea flow starter. I’ve used it to generate stuff like site profile logos (like my little ghost in baseball cap here) and screen savers. I’ve used it for minor tasks like coding Excel macros and such.

But would I say it’s a major life impactor? I’d have to say that even though it saves a little time here or there… no.

Something else to consider is that it’s a wonderful social window if you have friends that you don’t get to hang out with very often due to geography and life.

I have a couple of good friends who are too far away after I moved to another area. We play games online and have a nice social hangout for a few hours each Saturday. Voice chatting works great.

It’s fantastic to be able to regularly spend time with them.

Not a smoker myself, but I can tell you what worked for my brother when he quit in college.

AC went out in his dorm during an August heat wave, and it took forever for them to fix it. He decided that it would be a perfect time to go cold turkey, since he’d be so miserable from the heat that the few days of nicotine withdraw wouldn’t really be comparably bad. And he said it was right, he didn’t think about it during the worst part, and by the time they fixed the AC, he was 90% of the way through the process.

So if you live in one of the parts of the world moving to summer right now, it might be worth a shot.

I use both, they are two separate words, not one word with multiple spellings.

Not sure why people are changing it. Yes, language evolves, but maybe we could all focus on evolving it in areas that actually need evolution?

If you have to deal frequently with toilets with flush sensors at your office (or really any public restroom), you’ve probably been grossed out by them flushing (and spraying water at you) before you’re ready.

As an adult, I learned that handle-adjacent sensors can be dealt with by hanging TP over them, and won’t flush until you remove it as you’re leaving the stall. Wall sensors (like one infamous office toilet I deal with) can be handled with a post it note placed over the sensor; I keep some at the office just for this purpose. In an emergency, sometimes spit-dabbing a piece of TP can stick it to the wall over the sensor, but this isn’t as reliable.

Just get into these habits when you use sensor toilets, and you’ll never have to worry about disgusting flush spray from prematurely flushing public toilets ever again.

Neither. I’d remove Wednesdays.

Middle of the week off day lets you get all your errands done with little annoyance from or waiting behind the public, so you get everything knocked out and have your weekends 100% for you.

More importantly, on a 4 day workweek with Wed/Weekend off, you NEVER work more than two consecutive days. Ever. It’s fantastic.

Exactly. Read the OP’s question in the title and immediately thought the answer is “Literally any other restaurant.”

Are you on Windows 11?

Regardless of how your touch typing improvement project goes, be sure to get a good mic. Voice typing has come a long way, if you work in circumstances where you can speak aloud. It’s usually faster than my touch typing most of the time (not that I’m a blazing fast typist, but still).

I trained in Tang Soo Do for almost 5 years in my 30s, before I hurt myself (an injury not related to martial arts training). I’ve been wanting to get back into it in the years since, but haven’t been able to for various reasons.

I really enjoyed the training. I kept in good shape, and became very close with the people in my school… I still talk to them occasionally today despite having moved out of the area some years back. I enjoyed practicing the various techniques, pushing myself to my limits… I would highly recommend structured martial arts training to anyone.

That being said: martial arts are a LAST defense… they are NOT the go-to defense.

If you’re attacked, especially by multiple assailants, RUNNING is what you’re looking to do. Your self-defense skills are primarily there to CREATE an opportunity to flee, if you don’t have one immediately available.

Life is not a 1960’s kung-fu movie, and you risk a lot by trying to stand your ground when you don’t have to, so fight is rarely the correct answer when presented with a fight-or-flight scenario. It’s better to not be in that mindset.

Being aware of your own shortcomings and that you don’t like them is a gargantuan milestone, OP.

Most people are in extreme denial about who they are, and what their shortcomings are, and it leaves them very poor in regards to the potential to grow.

If you’re aware of and acknowledging things you don’t like about yourself: that’s actually a huge and powerful thing. You know what the things are about yourself that you want to improve.

Always remember, you don’t have to change completely overnight or anything, like you’re freaking Ebenezer Scrooge being visited by ghosts.

You can start by picking any one opportunity you see about yourself. “I don’t like that I (negative trait/action), so today I’m going to focus on (doing something positive regarding that trait/action).” Focus on that for a while… find joy when you succeed in being better. Don’t beat yourself up when you fail… just look at it as more opportunity to grow. Over time as you’re establishing positive habits, you can add new things to work on.

Your knowledge that you are on a journey of improvement and your determination are your superpowers.

I will say that if you decide that you want to grow for the better, definitely check in with the pros if you can, and not just random folks like me on the internet. But my point is, your self-acknowledgement is HUGE, and can be a tool you use to chisel your way to a better you. Don’t dwell on the past and keep beating yourself up about it… instead use it as your base to climb from. You’ve got this if you want it.

I have two monitors but I do all my work on one the other is completely separate. Plays YouTube all day so that I have background noise to work with.

The Reddit antiwork community had quite a few ridiculous folks hanging out within it.

Not that getting to a post-scarcity society where people aren’t forced to work wasn’t a nice horizon-goal to have, but there are a million steps from where we are in the modern world to there, and a lot of those people wanted it done by next Tuesday. And then when you’d point out that was literally impossible, they’d stick their fingers in their ears and make noises. Needless to say, I didn’t try to stick around for long.

A “dream” (?) I had a month after my father was killed. A long story, apologies for the book.

To start with, for clarification, I have always been a lucid dreamer, going back to childhood. Not every night. Not every dream. But every time I had realization in a dream that I was dreaming, I could control circumstances and events of the dream the entire rest of the time I was having it. Every single lucid dream. Without exception. Likely a few hundred times by the time this happened, just shy of my thirtieth birthday.

I was dreaming of playing backyard football with my friends as a kid. It’s a happy memory, and I dream about it now and then. This particular night, I was in lucid mode. I was having fun doing whatever I wanted (throwing 200 yard touchdown passes, running around like an Olympic sprinter, what have you… I kind of return to my ten year old self in this one).

Before one play, the football suddenly deflates and goes completely flat. Weird, I think to myself… I don’t feel like I caused that to happen. But whatever. I tell my friends I’ll change the football out, and we’ll get back to it. In my mind, I summon up the equipment shed from my campus recreation officiating days back on campus in college.

I open up the shed and step inside. It’s just as I remembered, of course, but kind of dark, not much light is bleeding in here from outside. I do a 180 toward the door to flip on the light. And I felt everything change. Everything. And I didn’t cause it. I also hadn’t looked at it yet. But I felt it.

Instant warmth. Comfort. A sense of peace that I can’t really describe… language isn’t really sufficient.

I turn around and see that I am in the foyer of a beautiful house, full of warmth. It is pure wood tones through and through.

I realize that I can really smell the air… The woods, and the ocean, in a perfect balance. I recall never having a sense of smell in any other dream, lucid or otherwise. I’m not panicked or worried, this place is just too peaceful for fear to be. Just confused.

Lying on a table next to an open window is my favorite cat from my childhood, Pudding. I give him a scratch right behind the ears in his favorite spot, he purrs, rubs into me… like hey buddy, missed you. Almost like it hasn’t been almost twenty years since he died, the last time I saw him. Realization dawns.

Realization that I still know that this is a dream. Or at least I thought it was. But if this is still a dream, and I realize this is so, why is all this stuff happening without my control? That’s certainly never been a thing in a lucid dream before.

And why am I smelling the fresh air of a forest that is twenty feet away from the ocean? Why do I have tactile feel of my furry buddy who died years ago? It feels like reality. Crisp, sharp, full of senses normally non-existent or dulled in normal dreams.

I catch some movement to my side and turn. Walking down the stairs, with a smile, is my dad. He’s clean, unhurt, in perfect shape… not at all like he was in the hospital when I last saw him, beaten up and brain dead. Before I even know what’s happening, he’s got me in a hug. I’m too stunned to react much.

“You’ve always been too stingy with the hugs,” he says. The feel of him, the sound of him talking… so real. I realize fully, finally, 100%. This is no dream. I hug him back, delighted.

As I pull away, all I can say is, “Aren’t I dreaming?”

He gives me the look he has always given me when I ask a completely stupid question. “Are you?” he says, all good-humor-light-sarcasm.

“But how… where are we?”

“My place,” he answers. “I needed to talk to you. Let’s go in there.”

He leads me down a side hall into a study. The few seconds while we walk, I’m still trying to reassert control. Open the floor and have us plunge through. Have him start dancing a jig. Have the house catch on fire. Anything to have proof that this is all a dream. Nothing works. As we enter the study, he tells me, “Morgan, son, seriously. Let go and relax.” He gives me that wry smile he gives when I’m being ridiculously amusing. “You’re not dreaming. Sit down.”

The room is supernaturally strong with the smell of cedar. Of pine. On the bookshelves, I’m noting some of my Dad’s favorites. Tolkien. Stephen King. James Clavell. A light bulb goes off over my head. This house is pretty much what my Dad would build if you gave him a perfect house button to press to make it come into creation. In a way, it feels like a piece of him, as real to me as he was right at that moment.

I take a seat in a wonderful leather bound chair. He sits across from me and says, “after this, we are going to talk about some things, and you won’t remember any of it consciously. But I had to tell you.”

And we talked. I felt the hours. I don’t remember the specifics… he was absolutely right about that. But I remember some feelings. Happiness and relief that he is okay here. Some good times… I think it was a good talk. Some sadness. I remember him hugging me goodbye. “I love you son.”

I woke with tears pouring out of me. Things “awake” felt… less real somehow, but still as they always were. I spent the next couple hours talking to my wife about what happened, in the middle of the night.

In the following days, I went back over my experience in my mind, while it was fresh. I came to the conclusion that it was most likely not a dream, because it was so unlike any other dream I had ever had before (or have ever had since). I left a small chance in my head (like maybe 2%) that it actually was a dream, because I’d been grieving pretty hard, and maybe there was some weird chemical imbalance in my brain chemistry or something. I was even slightly miffed at dad that he used this experience on me, and not my younger sister (who was taking this as hard as I was, if not more so).

Then, in July the same year, my mom fell ill and passed away. And I hit the wall of pain all over again. But this time, with a sliver of peace that I didn’t have last time. I realized that this is why Dad shared this experience with me. He knew this was going to happen, and soon.

I’ll never forget the gift. The view into the other side. The transition that makes my grief for those who have passed into a selfish thing… that I trust that they are fine, and I’m really just sad that I’m not going to see them again for a long while.