Don’t you love that feeling of having an absolute shit 0100-0159 and then watching the clock reset to 0100 again? I worked last fall when the clocks changed and a couple of us had just cleared calls at the hospital and we were standing around our ambulances talking. I happened to pull my phone out and watched the time tick from 0159-0100 and I was like “hey guys, that shitty hour we just had? We get to do it all over again!”

I always forget you can get just the card without the passport.

In my state you can apply to get your ballot by mail, but you have to do that for every election (which reminds me, I need to send my application in for the next election). If you don’t do that you can go in person to the voting location that is predetermined for you based on your address. They have a list of everyone who is registered as eligible to vote in person at that location. When you register to vote you get a voter ID card in the mail which is basically a little paper card with your name, county, and the location that you vote at. You just take your voter card with you to vote and they cross you off the list and give you your ballot to vote in person. If you already registered to vote by mail but you forgot to send your ballot in you can take your mail-in ballot to your in person location and they’ll tear it up and let you vote in person.

For people who might not be in the US and don’t understand why this is a bad idea in the US and proportionately hurts poor people, proof of citizenship is usually a passport. A passport costs $130. You need supporting documents like your birth certificate, SSN, and a drivers license/state ID to get it. For your first passport you usually have to make an appointment to go somewhere authorized like a library, post office, or courthouse to apply, and then they send the application off and it can take weeks to months to get back, depending how backed up the processing agency is (and I’m sure there will be artificial delays during voting years if this passes). Also, they are passing laws limiting where you can go to apply, so now libraries and the post office are losing the ability to process passport applications, so people will have to go to the county courthouse, which could be a long drive from where they live, especially if you live in a rural area. For people who don’t drive, or only have one car that is shared with another working adult, or use public transportation that has a limited range (or just doesn’t exist in most of the US), or are disabled and can’t travel far, this can be a huge problem.

Also, all these places are only open during normal business hours, so you probably have to take time off work to go apply. Federal minimum wage is only $7.25/hr while the living wage is actually much higher (living wage for 1 adult living alone in a 1 bedroom apartment where I live was considered almost $23/hr in 2024), and if someone is making minimum wage or close to it they almost certainly aren’t getting paid time off, so now they have to come up with $130 for the fee and lose time off work.

I have a neighbor right now that has an obnoxious exhaust on his ridiculous looking lifted truck. For some inexplicable reason he goes out almost every night at midnight and redlines the fucking motor for a minute or so. On New Years Eve he redlined the damned thing for over 5 minutes straight. It kept hitting the rev limiter and cutting off then turning back on. I was praying the thing would blow up. It’s so damned obnoxious. I don’t know what he’s compensating for, but stop taking it out on the environment and sleeping children.

You just brought back so many miserable memories

Homeschooling is an antisocial behavior. Most parents who homeschool are doing so because they want their child isolated from the public school system and away from “the world”. They want to be the only influence in their child’s life and they want to solely shape the outcome of who their child is. That’s antisocial as fuck and incredibly unhealthy for the kid, but the parents don’t care as long as they get what they want.

But why wouldn’t you want your child to have the highest chance of having enough money to survive, or the best chance of getting a job they want? I know so many homeschooled kids who ended up working for exploitative employers or doing really hard labor for really shitty pay because they weren’t educated enough (both academically and in life skills) to get jobs doing anything else. To just be like “well, you don’t need money to be happy or do well in life so I’m going to give my child a subpar education” in this economy is just naive at best and cruel at worst.

My landlord doesn’t accept thoughts and prayers.

The studies that show that homeschooled kids perform better academically are actually flawed. Adults who were homeschooled are much less likely to finish higher education and statistically have lower incomes than adults who attended school.

https://crhe.org/research/

God of War: Ragnarok.

I don’t have a console so I had to wait for it to port to PC, then wait til it went on sale and I could snag it at a more reasonable price. I loved the one before it and was so excited to play. The first couple hours were good, and then I felt like it was an endless repetition of fight a boss, talk about our feelings while we walk to fight another boss, talk about our feelings some more, and repeat. The part where you have to play as Atreus helping that giant girl do her daily chores made me want to weep from boredom and it just went on forever. I think I gave up shortly after Freya met her brother again, but I don’t really remember the storyline because it was just so mind numbingly exhausting, like listening in on a bunch of therapy sessions (and I’m super pro “take care of your mental health and go to therapy if you need it”, but if I have to listen to a literal god whining and acting willfully helpless for an entire video game I’m out).

I have been told that it is actually a good game that gets better and I should give it another go, but I’m not sure if it’s good for MY mental health.

All my phone has is on it is an absolutely embarrassing amount of memes and pictures of my cat. There aren’t even any nudes on it, although maybe I should take some to traumatize any government agent who goes digging through it. Would serve them right.

I work in EMS. I’m also constantly checking out people’s veins (veins are beautiful!)

Any house I go into I’m mentally determining if a stretcher would get into the home, how easy it would be to get it around, and how I could get someone out if the stretcher didn’t fit. Basically everywhere I go I’m like “how easy would it be to get you out if you dropped unconscious?” I’m also judging how well the home is set up for maneuverability if the person living there has a sudden loss of mobility - even young people can break a bone and end up on crutches or temporarily in a wheelchair and you want more room to move than you may think. My apartment is up several flights of steps with no elevator, but if I could scoot myself up the stairs and get inside my apartment I’d be ok. I have everything set up in such a way that if I was injured I could get around very well inside for a few months, it would just be the coming in and out that would be a problem.

I also always back my car into parking spots, because we always back the ambulance in. When we aren’t on calls the ambulance is always backed in so that if we get a call we can leave quickly, and if we are on a call the ambulance is backed in so we can leave quickly if the scene becomes unsafe.

I started the first book February 3rd after a podcaster I listen to casually mentioned it and said it was a great read. I’m on the 7th book now 😂

I grew up fairly socially isolated. I was always taught as a kid and younger teenager that people different from me are bad, that X type of people deserve bad things to happen to them, yada yada conservative bullshit.

Then I got older. It’s hard to see X type of people as the bad guy when they’re treating you with more kindness and less judgement than everyone you grew up around and when you realize that they may be different from you and want something different from life than you, but they still just want to survive the day and find happiness, just like you.

Not everyone has their passport. If you do, that should be sufficient. It also made updating my passport easier, way less paperwork to send in. I’d never gotten around to updating my passport to the correct name and it was much less paperwork to send in.

If your name doesn’t match what’s on your birth certificate, look into whether your state allows you to change your birth certificate and do it before it’s too late. My name is not my birth name or my married name, I had it legally changed. I got tired of hauling around my birth certificate, marriage certificate, divorce paperwork, and legal name change to show the paper trail that I both was who I was and was no longer legally married. Turns out in my state I just had to send in a notarized form, copies of my paperwork and pay small fee and I got my birth certificate updated to my current name. Now I can “prove” who I am by just showing my birth certificate and ignore the fact that I was married and changed my name. It also made updating my passport easier. Granted, I am not trans, but I did it last year and they had the option to change gender on the form.

I work in EMS. When we respond to house fires in the middle of the night there’s kind of two different ways they go. When people have smoke detectors and their house catches on fire in the middle of the night they’re the ones who call us and we get on scene to find them outside their home in their pajamas, watching their house burn, very shaken up but ok. They never need anything from us ambulance-wise except maybe some blankets. When people don’t have smoke detectors in their homes and they catch on fire in the middle of the night a neighbor or passer-by calls the fire in and we get on scene and the firefighters are dragging bodies out to us.

I’m in my 30s and I don’t feel ready for a job. Work sucks, I’d rather chill at home all day and do whatever I want, but unfortunately I got bills to pay, I live alone and I like my little apartment. Also, I spent 2 months at home on medical leave last year and the toll it took on my mental health was incredible. As much as I hate working, I need something to get me up and out of my home and around other people (and I hate people).

I would seriously consider trying to get at least a part time job. Growth is painful, but you can’t become a better person if you never push yourself forward and do the hard things.

I think it’s also important to realize that there’s a difference between being hurt and being wronged. Sometimes someone can do something that hurts you but isn’t wrong, morally, ethically, or legally. It might even be the right thing (ie, breaking up a relationship if it just isn’t working out). It might hurt you, but it didn’t wrong you. And then some people wrong you, such as committing crimes against you, being abusive, or shitty to you, and that’s not ok.