Sewing, mending, repairing clothes. I am really bad at it. Also knitting. I will never be able to understand wtf I am seeing.

Not wishing him dead isn’t the same as tolerating him and his beliefs

Damn the replies to your comment are wild.

I agree with everything you say. I hate this man but I am not as petty as to think this is funny or that he should die.

I mean, it’s fun and all for a while, until you realize that 8/10 people have developed a moderate to severe drinking problem by the age of 25.

Yes. Bavaria specifically.

Don’t be, we all graduated as alcoholics

It’s absolutely acceptable to go to a university lecture at 8 am, and sit in the front row with a beer. The professors won’t mind. You can buy beer in the cafeteria as well as in a vending machine at the library.

Pulling out a bottle of hard liquor is frowned upon tho.

Thinking about that cab driver who was so pissed when I asked him to please not watch a movie while driving. dude had a tablet attached to the window in front of him

Kudos to your friend going through with a reduction to pursue her passion!

In my case, I have a very small band width, so I cannot shop in regular stores. (In my city, there is exactly one shop that has my size.) As a teen and young woman, I simply didn’t have the money to even consider a 50€ sports bra, let alone a 100€+ one. And since the selection is super limited, I didn’t even find one in my size that would - no matter the money - give enough support for comfort.

Funnily enough, regular wired bras with cups still ended up giving better support than any sports bra I could find. But they still only work so well. (And I, by far, wasn’t as passionate about sports as to get a reduction, or spend my limited bra money on a semi working, ugly sports bra.)

breast movement varies from annoyance to uncomfortable

As a teenager and young woman, not being able to find a good super supportive sports bra for my weird size was one of the reasons I stopped trying to exercise.

I still hold my boobs automatically when taking the stairs or when I run somewhere. Otherwise it hurts and feels like my breasts are being torn away from my body.

Thanks for your comment, it made me realize I mixed two things together. What I referred to is not really propaganda. It is lived experience. If you have not seen one person who successfully changed something and everyone who tried had to bear immense consequences - not just them but their loved ones - your motivation to try approaches zero. You get taught it’s not worth it. You’re powerless, and to be fair, it is rather true.

And yes, life in Russia is, for the most part, decent. You have a job. You have access to education, movies, you can build a family, buy an apartment, start a business. You can have fun. It’s not a free life with endless possibilities, there are suppressions, no free elections, all that jazz. But your everyday life is pretty ok. Why give that up for the pursuit of some higher ideal like freedom, especially when you get told over and over again that it will bring nothing good and no change. Yeah it sucks that other people die but it’s not you, and if you would so much as go outside with a piece of paper saying “No War”, your life as you know it is fucked, and the people who suffer won’t be any better off either. Solidarity is not worth the price of your sacrificing yourself and your loved ones. Basically, the struggle and pain isn’t big enough, there is still something left to lose.

Maybe I would call it self made propaganda, but this is just a gut feeling, not a real term.

Removed by mod

It’s twins actually, Lulu and Nana. The gene editing might have increased their cognitive function.

I don’t know why, but I cannot bring myself to condemn the editing.

We have friends with a similar age gap, she is I think 36 and he is 56 now. Their son is 3.5. He also has grown up kids not much younger than his wife. The kid was planned.

It’s hard and he is passing on having another child for age reasons (see below), but their son is great and none of them regret the decision. The dad’s back and knee are bad, so running after their Duracell powered son who looks like Finn from Adventure Time (that hair! Dude is set for life, he’ll make bank as a hair modell) can get difficult. But they manage and are active and a very cute and happy family. Having a kid is always hard and stressful, unless you are a tiktok influencer, then it is the easiest thing you’ve done because it comes so naturally to you /s

As for it “feeling strange”: from my own life experience, things only feel strange if you allow them to feel strange. Everything can be awkward and weird and strange and whatever, or you just decide this is your life and only you get to decide what is and what is not strange.

As for my friends, I think nothing about anything in their life feels weird. She literally lived with her now husband and his son for a while. It was fine. His kids are cool with the younger sibling. They get to choose what is normal. They chose that this is. Their family is. This is their family and their normality.

To add: Having two little kids vs one little kid is a whole different level. He has first hand experience in that, so I don’t think not wanting another kid means he regrets it. Not at all. I think he just realizes that this would be not double as hard but quadruple as hard and he won’t be able to do that. My husband is 35 and cannot imagine having a second child for similar reasons. He just doesn’t have the energy level for another small being - and it will be more than double the energy required, while he couldn’t give an extra 50% even if he wanted to.

So the question is really, how do you feel about it? Do you two have some energy left? Are you ok with taking on the majority of the physical work? Even if your partner is doing fine physically now, he might decline sooner than you think, unexpectedly.

I might add, bluntly: you have already decided that it is ok for you that the likely (if not ideal) outcome of your relationship is that your husband dies much before you. You will likely be a young widow. It might also be that he lives to 100 and you die in a freak accident after reading this. I’m not telling you anything new here. This is just to remind you of your choice and your thoughts on this when you decided to commit to each other. Because a lot of people point out that your kid might not have a dad for long. (Which, yeah, other people lose their parents at a young age too, but having it be more likely is another thing, although, does this mean sick/disabled people with a shortened life span should not have kids either, and then we are in eugenics territory or the antinatalists chime in.)

Anyway, I’ll get a lot of hate in the comments (honestly taking this question to lemmy where a lot of antinatalists are hanging out is crazy) but in my opinion - which must be totally valuable to you lol - I’d go for it. Even if it is hard and you reach your limits, this is such a short time of intense chaos in your life. And then you’ll have a kid. You’ll have experienced this crazy thing. And love and support don’t care for your age. Hugs and kisses are just as heartfelt. Your kid will be just as much of their own person, no matter what age their parents were. We all don’t have a perfect family. But as I mentioned above, normal is what you define is normal. And a perfect and ideal family is whatever you decide it is.

Thank you for reading all of this.

Apfelschorle

Thank you so much!! I wish I had more stuff to post but I’ll try 🫠 I think the guilt tripping is working

Thank you!

I 👏 want 👏 more 👏 girl 👏 content 👏

To be clear - I am talking about stereotypically “female” subjects, not about the gender itself, and I hope it goes without saying that I want people of all genders to be part of it. Some topics over on reddit are full of guys, NBs, and everyone else, but are what a bigoted 90s teacher would call “female” topics. I want more stuff of what that 90s teacher would call “girly” stuff.

I mean, something like a makeup community. Maybe skincare and fashion. Cleaning tips. Pre and post and peri pregnancy content. The parenting community on lemmy is super quiet. There is a sewing community but it is rather quiet too. I haven’t found a mending focused community yet. Boy there even isn’t a sailor moon community, like 😭 come on

I’m horrible in creating any content tho, so uhm, not sure I should be complaining.

The problem in this thread seems to be that children are seen as one homogenous group of people between ages 0 to 17. And you can either send you 5 year old to NYC without any technology by themselves, or check your 17 year old’s location 24/7. Forget about any kind of in between.

Like, of course I am “surveilling” my 3 year old, I am literally obligated to. I do this with my own eyes or leave them in the care of a capable person, although depending on the situation (relative, babysitter, daycare) it is still me who is liable when something happens.

I am happy to leave my 8 year old rumble around freely as long as they return home by a time that we agreed on. We can very well also agree on them calling if they won’t make it home by the agreed time, and if they don’t call or pick up their phone within an additional 30 minutes, I will check their location. This can be a known and agreed upon checking. And it is about mutual trust. I trust my kid at a certain age to be responsible and keep track of time, and be available by phone (unless otherwise agreed or if they don’t have a phone to begin with), as well as be where we agreed they would be, without checking. And I hope my kid will also trust me to keep up my side of the agreement. I won’t check unless it’s past return time and you are not picking up your phone.

This mutual trust is important in families. You deserve privacy, even if you are a kindergartener. This privacy will expand with age. This is like hiding your locked diary or leaving an open diary on your desk. You should not feel the need to hide it because I for sure won’t look at it. It is yours. Similarly, you can roam around freely even with an airtag. This thing is not for daily use.

Now, does my 17 year old need an airtag? To me they are basically an adult. Hell knows I had all the freedom in the world at that age. If they feel safer knowing I could check on them when they are on a night out, maybe we can keep a similar agreement as above. But otherwise it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to me.

It’s a show, not a movie, but I have been watching Fleabag at least 20 times on repeat within half a year (November to April). I do a lot of housework and it often plays in the background while I cook or clean. I know every line. I know every shot and smile and can basically watch it in my head.

When I was 11, I was watching the VHS tape with Pirates of the Caribbean daily for about 1.5 months.

Movies and series are just one of my favorite things in the world. I do want to make time for that. Are there more important and wholesome things to do? Absolutely. But I also feel like I should be allowed to do something not meaningful or important every now and then. I’ve been thinking about it a lot throughout my life, whether, on my deathbed, I will regret having watched so much stuff, thinking I should have spent that time differently. I don’t think I will. Because I love stories. I think it is one (possible) meaning of life, to listen to as many stories as you can. I listen to people’s stories, to things that are actually happening, and TV and movies are another medium that also tells stories. I understand that a lot of people prefer books, maybe that’s objectively the better, healthier choice, but I am fine with choosing the former. I once fancied a career in that field, but after a year I realized that it killed any joy I got out of it, and fucked up my health (99.9% of people are smokers). But at the end of the day, thinking of something from scratch and conveying this idea of events to someone else is fantastic. It is amazing. I feel like I have lived a thousand lives, and I want to live another thousand.

And I reevaluate that question and my answer to it often, on a regular basis. So far, I am very d’accord with it.

Also, just to make it clear, of course I do other stuff. I go outside with my kid every day, we play, we are being creative, I meet a lot of people and always have. I just don’t see less value in watching a movie than in woodwork, gardening, sewing. Also, to be fair, a lot of times when I watch something, it’s because I can’t do anything else, “more productive”, in that moment. I’m not gonna go turn on the sewing machine at midnight. The realistic choice is between watching tiktoks, shorts, etc, or hanging at lemmy for an hour, or watch a movie. I think watching a movie (or half) is time better spent than on social media clicking through short videos.