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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • I don’t!

    My wife does it for me, lol.

    I have a group text with my immediate family so we can coordinate semi-regular get-togethers, and I do the same with my own kids, but that’s it.

    (There’s no way I’d be able to get my parents to learn how use anything more complicated anyhow, and just getting everyone in my own household to use a shared calendar was a whole thing. Simpler is better.)

    My wife, however, likes staying informed, if not always in touch, and so dutifully does all the obligatory proud parent posting on facebook. She lets me know if anything important comes up from one of the relatives on there.

    Distant family stays distant, which is how I like it, because most of them are pretty right wing anyway and the less I have to engage with their gibberish the better. Otherwise I only visit facebook occasionally to browse a shitposting page for a podcast I listen to. It’s better this way.



  • The fact that it’s usually women doing the dumb thing is problematic, but these jokes are easily mapped onto whoever you want to denigrate. As a Montana, these were often jokes about North Dakota, and as the scion of a large Norwegian clan, I also often heard these as Sven and Ole jokes.

    To me the latter is actually a funnier way to approach them, because it’s two characters who everyone knows are dumb (and who are stand-ins for those people in your life who act this way) and you’re not just blanket insulting a whole group of people.














  • So a while back, the smoke alarm in the kid’s room directly below mine started going off for no apparent reason at 3 AM. Got up, went downstairs to silence it, checked everything in the house, smelled for smoke, looked at all the outlets, etc. Dug through drawers to find a new 9V battery and figured it was either a battery issue or a literal bug set it off. Never really got back to restful sleep after that, and the next day I kept worrying I had missed something and a shorted wire was quietly smoldering away in the wall somewhere.

    Next night, around the same time, I was again jolted out of sleep by a loud beep, but by the time I had gotten downstairs, there was no alarm going off, just my ears ringing. Asked everyone else if they heard an alarm, they said no. I must’ve hallucinated it, but I was also experiencing the most intense tinitus I have ever had. I don’t usually get tinitus at all, but my ears were ringing so loudly I couldn’t get back to sleep for a half hour afterwards.

    I believe I had a major psychosomatic event, which manifested tinitus. It’s either that or the timing of the random tinitus that woke me up was a bizarre coincidence.