Well, I can say this much: never discuss your philosophy on life and death with your doctor, because you’ll need to find another doctor after they flip their shit and assume you’re going to off yourself.

Ikr?

Just got head!

Well, there’s a whole shit ton to unpack about identity.

Let’s start with definitions.

Ethnicity is essentially genetic. There’s usually an associated culture that goes with a given ethnicity.

Culture is the combination of practices, beliefs, and “tradition” of a given group, whatever that group may consist of.

Nationality is where you live.

Race is a loose grouping based on primarily skin color and the region one’s ethnicity came from.

Identity is the parts of those things you internalize, what you self label as.

So, based on what you’ve said in your post, you’re multiethnic, a mix of multiple peoples and places. You can freely choose which of those you integrate into your identity. It won’t ever mean that you aren’t those things, as regards external factors like the kind of hair color you have because of being north african in ancestry.

You could freely choose to integrate Mexican culture into your identity, or not. It would not, however, change your nationality.

If you move to the states, then you’d also have to deal with the legal side of things, which is not the same as identity. It’s an ugly truth, but race matters here, way more than it should. As such, you can’t really just pick your race on legal documents. It has to be as accurate as it’s possible to get, or there can be consequences. If you look white, but put down black, it’s going to end up being a pain in the ass for you.

However, since race itself is arbitrary in a lot of ways, there’s some wiggle room. There are some pretty damn dark white folks, and some pretty damn light Hispanics. And it isn’t like most people can look at someone and tell if they’re greek, arab, or south american. A lot of forms specify the difference between being white Hispanic and white, non Hispanic.

So there’s room to pick your race unless you’re black, in which case, it doesn’t matter what ancestry you are, you’re black and stuck with it because the us is fucked you in that regard. You don’t even have to be of African descent to get shoved into being black, you just have to be dark enough. Which is very fucked up, even for a country as fucked regarding race as this country can get.

So, you do have to be thoughtful in what you put in official documents, or it can end up fucking you later on.

But we can all identify as whatever we want, within reason. My pasty white ass could try to identify as black, but it ain’t going to end well, despite having grown up in a black neighborhood and having a lot more in common with my neighbors than the arbitrary similarities I’m supposed to have with other crackers. But if I want to internalize my Irish heritage, nothing is stopping me. Same with my German heritage, the traces of Polish, Welsh, Spanish, and Scottish. I can identify as man, as a southerner, as a resident of my state, of my town, as an american, as whatever, really.

Largely, as long as there’s no cognitive dissonance to overcome, most people don’t give a fuck about someone else’s identity. Like if my pale ass says I identify as black, that’s going to be strange enough that people are going to wonder if I’m an idiot, a troll, or pulling some kind of racist shit. If my big bearded ass puts on a dress and claims to be a woman, there’s going to be people that can’t accept the difference between the claim and the visual reality. Now, if I shaved and lost more muscle, it wouldn’t be as hard to overcome. You see what I mean? The more people have to think against their senses and preconceptions, the harder it is to lay external claim to an internal identity.

There is the flip side though. If you come here, claim the identity of whiteness, but you don’t also lay claim to the external factors of the culture of white america, then it doesn’t matter what your skin color is, you aren’t going to have much support. And yes, there is such a thing as white culture in the US. There’s actually multiple versions of it. It’s just hard to see since it dominates all the other race based cultures, and becomes the default american cultural base. But it is distinct from the more general american culture.

All of it is largely a construct though. Even ethnicity has a degree of arbitrary limits to it, since most ethnicities aren’t isolated enough in origin for there to be no bleeding between a given ethnicity and one a hundred miles away in origin. And, an ethnicity may ignore subethnicities in general usage, like “black” Irish largely being ignored as an ethnicity that’s distinct from Irish. And you’ll have regional variations that get ignored in the same way.

There’s really a lot to it all. More than I can reasonably pack into a comment and it still be readable by most people (screen reading is harder to follow than printed). So I’ll not belabor the subject.

The real advice is to not bullshit. Treat any paperwork as needing as direct an interpretation as possible, and leave identity out of it, relegating identity to non official usage

Hmmm, if you’re asking if the external flow of what we perceive as time would shift according to an observer’s state of mind, that’s doubtful.

But our perception of time isn’t the same thing as the flow of time. Our temporal sense is definitely subjective, and there’s been some research into that (though damned if I can recall the details without looking it up, and I’m getting a bit brain fried tired, so not up to doing so).

Anticipation, be it fearful or happy, definitely shifts how we perceive time.

Well, that’s an accurate origin of latino.

But that doesn’t mean someone is obligated to internalize being latino. That’s extra true when a person is the child of immigrants. They can be raised within their parent’s culture, and then take on varying degrees of identification with either that culture, or the surrounding one.

And there’s nothing saying that someone in the Latin American country they’re born in can’t separate themselves, at least internally, from the culture of their country, or their region.

That’s true of any culture. You can be from the us and take on any degree of identity as an american, or reject that entirely and build your own identity on any number of factors.

You never met anyone that’s of latino origins that assimilated fully into the culture of a different country? It’s pretty common. My best friend’s husband is Nicaraguan, and identifies as that, Latino, and American. He’s got siblings that were raised in Nicaragua before the family moved here that outright ignore that culture and don’t even speak Spanish with anyone poster than their parents. He’s got nieces and nephews that embrace being latino, but not necessarily Nicaraguan, and vice versa.

A sense of cultural identity is largely voluntary.

No idea about anyone else, but I tend to only chime in if the question spurs some kind of thought, or I have a story that matches, or some other kind of quasi useful input.

So it can be weeks before I jump in, or multiples in the same day.

I’m not sure if it would be better or worse, but even in places where organized crime is stable and relatively low key, there’s not much in the way of cooperation.

Like, in the city I used to work in, the drug trade was pretty much owned by one group, gambling by another, moonshine by a third, and if you wanted guns, you tended to deal with the drug guys, but that was because they had outside deals with one or another of the cartels (I have no clue which) where they could get more than just the same stuff you could buy on your own legally (but would probably buy a stolen one if you were looking for something for a reason). This meant that they ran the trade de facto, despite it not being something they cared about if someone else sold guns here and there.

Now, the cartels did have people that were killers. But not hired guns, so to speak.

But those groups didn’t really communicate. There weren’t regular meetings to divvy up the city’s vices or anything. They just didn’t fuck with each other because they weren’t set up to handle other trades.

There were some Russians that tried to move in at one point, running heroin, but they went away. Went away being a euphemism for eating a bunch of lead salad, which is bad for one’s longevity. Supposedly, and I was not involved in the shit at all, it was handled in house, nobody asked the cartel for any help. The cartel wouldn’t have been willing to send their men up, fight some group anyway. They’d just wait and make deals in other ways. Not worth it in terms of risk/reward. They’d sell guns to the gang, but not manpower.

Again, supposedly, there was an Armenian gang that ran gambling at one point, and they got busted which opened up room for the mixed group to pick up the pieces. But that was before I paid any attention to any of it. Only reason I paid enough attention to pick that kind of stuff up was bouncing and doing security. The guys running shine liked to swing dick around bars sometimes, trying to play a protection bullshit, and the titty bars I bounced sometimes were fairly popular with them in that regard and because they could get free attention.

Also have a friend that made high interest personal loans for a few years, and he had to pay a cut to the guys running the gambling. I mean, didn’t have to, it was just easier and safer. One of his uncles was a moonshiner, so he knew some of those guys as well.

From what I gathered, that’s the way most cities operate. There may have been a time when there was more broad organization, but afaik, that was dying out in the eighties.

However, pretty much any city of any decent size has some kind of organized crime. It’s just a matter of how big the group is, and how much they control. Some places, you’ll have one of the national level gangs running things, others it might be all small groups running territories within a city. Shit, it isn’t just cities. The drug trade is like that out here in the boonies. Only difference is that you run into specific types of drugs being handled by a group. Locally, there’s a bike “club” that more or less runs the meth and pills, but weed is a free for all, and coke is really only for making crack, which is spread all over.

Anyway, that’s going way off topic. The point is that there’s rarely any kind of cooperation at all, much less enough to have some kind of justice system in place.

Eh, the kind of thing you’re asking about is essentially fiction. Not that murder for hire isn’t a thing, it’s just that it doesn’t work like anything you’ve read or seen in movies. It’s one of those things where if you aren’t part of a criminal enterprise, you aren’t going to be able to hire someone, and you’ll be hiring them from someone else in the same network.

So, in any semi realistic situation, there won’t be any arbitration or argument. You fail, you fuck up, you die. Or, I guess, turn state’s evidence, which is where what little about actual “contract” killing that’s known comes from. It isn’t like an actual contract.

Now, in fiction? Tons of options. Likely, you’d have whatever head of the crime network making the decision, maybe with other heads, maybe solo.

But, again, the term contract killing isn’t exactly about a contract. There’s not a formal arrangement involved. It’s contract in the meaning of hired.

It’s easy when you use the same password for encoding everything.

I rarely worked the window, and it was only when someone was on break, or we were under staffed and the other people on shift weren’t exactly capable of running a register.

But we had a few regulars.

My personal favorite was “farmer man”. Homie would ride through with his animals. Usually it was one of those pot belly pigs, named Harvey. But he had a goat named Bill, a rooster named Charlie, and sometimes a nanny goat called Maria.

Why those names? No idea, it was drive through, so no time for long chats. But he’d order for them by using their names, as in, “I’ll have a whopper, and Harvey here’ll have a cheeseburger.”

The awesome visits from him were when the cab of his truck was essentially full of critters. One day, the rooster was with him, along with a bunch of hens just chilling on the passenger side.

Really good customer, he would roll through a few times a week, always polite and had his shit ready. He was literally a farmer, there’s plenty of them out here in the sticks. One of the normal window staff asked him if she could bring her kids to see a farm, and he was happy as hell to say yes. His critters were essentially pets, though the chickens were an egg source. Dude was a one man petting zoo lol.

Then there was “coffee”. He’d roll up, and order “coffee”. That’s it, nothing else. And I mean that’s all me would say. You’d ask what size, and he’d just repeat “coffee”. At first, people just got mad, assuming he was fucking with them. But he kept coming back. Eventually the manager just said “fuck it, tell him he’s getting a large”. He got told that, and to drive forward. He’d take the large coffee, hand over his money, and that was it. But he never said anything. If you told him to have a nice day, he’d nod and smile a little.

There was also “naked lady”. As the name might indicate, she would come through naked. There would be a visible pile of clothes in the passenger seat of her car, sometimes just a robe, but usually what looked like jeans and a t-shirt. Her order varied. But she’d been coming there for years by the time I ran into her at the window.

It was usually only night time, fairly late, but every now and then she’d come through during breakfast rush. Story was that she had called in one day to ask if it was okay to come through the drive through naked, and the manager at the time thirty it was a joke and said she didn’t care as long as the money didn’t get pulled out of her twat, before hanging up. No idea if it was true or not. If you worked the window at her usual times and were new, you’d get warned amd asked if you were okay serving her. We were also warned not to be creeps about it.

She was probably in her early forties, attractive, and friendly. Knew the window workers by name and would chat while waiting, when it was night. Didn’t really flash anyone, didn’t try and get any extra attention, but didn’t make effort to hide anything either.

One guy asked for a better look one night, and she said that he could look all he wanted, but she wasn’t putting on a show. Manager gave him hell over it, though the lady didn’t complain about it.

There was one lady that was usually on nights that wouldn’t deal with her, and that’s how I first encountered naked lady. Got called up from the kitchen and asked if I was okay taking care of a naked customer. I was in training to be a nurse’s assistant at the time, so I didn’t have an issue with nudity. It had already become just kinda unimportant to me. So I just shrugged and said sure. The manager warned me to be chill and that was that.

Nice lady.

What was weird was seeing her elsewhere in clothes. She was just as friendly if you ran into her at the grocery store or whatever. But it was always a little jarring, like she should be naked everywhere lol.

Beyond that, it was just the usual drunks, potheads, and occasional crack or meth head that were weird enough to stand out.

Probably me telling my manager to go fuck herself.

I think it was justified, but barely.

It was a fast food joint, so not exactly a job I was willing to take shit over.

I have long hair, and have since jr high. So did other employees, but only women and girls. A hair was found in food and it had to be mine, despite my hairnet, despite it being the wrong color, and not the same length.

I pointed all this out and she told me I needed to cut mine. I asked if this was a new policy for everyone, she said just me. So I told her to go fuck herself. Now, I’d have just said no politely, and let her fire me for something bullshit and collect unemployment. But back then, I had less self control.

After that, it was probably a dude I worked with at a nursing home. Weird dude, but a generally good partner to work with. Unfortunately, he liked stealing panties from patients. Why? Nobody knew. He said he didn’t wear them, and it wasn’t a sex thing. And that’s all he would say on the subject.

Dude was lifting them after they got back from laundry services, stuffing them in his pocket. He had taken enough that it was noticeable, as in the rest of the staff was having trouble finding them for the patients to wear. You expect some loss of clothing via laundry, or wear and tear, but not just underwear, and not in bulk unless there was some kind of accident in laundry, like a bleach spill.

The laundry staff were questioned about it, and it was pretty obvious it wasn’t them since they could have just said items were too damaged or stained, and nobody would have questioned it. They would have had records of tossing them, even if they were stealing them and faking it.

Dude got found out when he fucked up and pulled a pair out with his keys in the break room. You can’t mistake a pair of big cotton panties for anything else, and the patient name was inked on.

With that, he was questioned by the head nurse, then the administrator, and gave no satisfactory answer. He did, however, return the pilfered panties when threatened with a call to the police. Not that it would have amounted to anything, but he didn’t want the attention.

When I talked to him later on, he still wouldn’t say why he did it. We had all kinds of silly theories cooked up, and I suspect that the one that he had some kind of mother or grandmother fixation was true, minus the bit about him being a budding Norman Bates taking them to dress up his mom’s body.

Last I heard, he left the state, so I doubt I’ll ever run into him to try and ask again.

You’re confusing concepts. And yeah, I know it’s a shower thought, so it doesn’t need to be anything like that.

Wabisabi, beauty in the eye of the beholder, and the concept of “trash” beauty are related, but not the same.

Wabi sabi is more about realizing that mom matter how close to perfect you get something, there’s always the human element, so embrace those imperfections. It has the benefit that that which is broken still has beauty. This leads to the practice of visible repairs. But it’s more like how antiques are more valuable when you don’t fuck with them doing refinishing or painting, you do repairs to keep it functional, not to make it like new (and if you knew how often I’ve seen people ruin any monetary or historic value in knives, you’d want to use one on yourself).

The same kind of idea, seeing the beauty and value in things as they are can indeed be extended to things that were never crafted in the first place, like seeing a trashed room and appreciating the human element in it. But the key is that the mattress in and covered by trash isn’t the same thing as a broken vase.

And that is different from the spartan, minimalist to the point of apathy kind of single guy with no furniture arrangements. You can be minimalist and/or spartan in living without living in trash.

Now, being real, once you get things like food that is going to become a health risk, and pizza boxes can be, then that’s no longer about accepting this as they are, and becomes just being nasty (and I don’t throw that word around lightly). You can be disorganized, and still be clean. It’s harder, but completely doable.

That doesn’t take away from seeing a photo of such a vista and appreciating the beauty of the composition, and how it shines a light on the human condition, on how we are. It does not, however fall under the concept of wabi sabi as it exists in its home culture.

Like, I get what you mean, I do.

But it’s simply not accurate. Great as a shower thought! Just not accurate regarding the motives of all prostitutes and porn actors.

It isn’t about poverty, though that is there. It isn’t about addiction, though that’s definitely a big factor in both. But it has never been that simple.

I think what would be more accurate is that in a post scarcity environment, prostitution and pornography would cease to be about necessity. You would see way less of either, with pornography possibly becoming only self produced.

Prostitution would probably cease to be an exchange of goods or currency, which does mean it would be eliminated on a semantic level. After all, if it isn’t an exchange of goods/currency for a service, is it still prostitution, or is it just two consenting adults having sex? At that point, it’s no different than hooking up with someone you met via something like grindr.

But that doesn’t mean the basic idea of someone having sex with strangers for some kind of exchange would die entirely. It could end up as a more direct exchange of services. “Hey man, if I give you head, could you help me move this fridge?” “Sure dude, sounds like a fair trade to me.” You might even still have street level hooking, where people are just looking for some kind of exchange of sex, even if only for the rush, but it isn’t about money. Wouldn’t be much, most people aren’t into that. But there are people into that.

The internet put a huge dent in the porn industry. It didn’t kill it, and I don’t think it can. But people making their own porn for fun and sharing it changed the industry. Enough that I’m certain it will never go away entirely, though the exact shape of it may be so different as to not really count. But porn, at its core, is not about the porn industry. The industry could well die within years of scarcity disappearing, maybe even less time. But you’ll still have people making movies of themselves that they allow other people to enjoy. You’ll likely even have hobbyists that have skill with the film making that get asked to do the filming (I know a guy that does exactly that).

But, yeah, good shower thought!

Are you dense? Or just looking to troll someone?

It isn’t a universal thing, but yeah.

As others have said, a tablet typically refers to a prebound pad of paper, and most typically to one that is bound across the top, ala legal pads.

Like anything language related, usages bleed and shift. Back before bound paper was a thing, it was used to refer to any flat writing surface.

It goes back to tabula, from Latin, where the primary (but not only!) use was for the equivalent of a placard or other inscribed label, as well as any writing surface.

Think like a writing slate. The term tabula rasa is essentially the same as “clean slate”, and refers to writing on an actual slate being erased.

So, tablet over time has been used for pretty much any writing surface at all, and it’s not unusual to see it applied to any bound writing surface, even if it’s a loose-leaf binder. It is archaic though, and wasn’t exactly common in that specific usage (not that I’ve ever heard or seen anyway). But I have seen and heard it used that way, particularly for the kind of binders that run across an entire edge of a stack of papers, like you might use for a presentation. For ringed binders, I’ve only heard it used a handful of times, and never seen it in print.

Caveat: I’m just a word nerd, so I’ve never tracked things down to primary sources. Etymology is a fairly rigorous thing, and nothing I’ve said here is exactly rigorous. Take it as a casual thing pulled from memory rather than something you could cite in a class assignment.

What came first, the urge to be a dick needlessly, or the lack of creativity?

Same as they always have. It’s fast. You can grab taco bell in a flash compared to even the best run diner or cafe. And you don’t have to sit around with a bunch of strangers that are essentially walking disease vectors to do it, unless you want to.

The draw of fast food joints has never been primarily about the food quality, or service. Yeah, you’ll likely pick the place that has what you consider better food, and avoid shit service, but that’s a different thing.

Even joints that pretend to not be fast food (like chikfila) only pull a small portion of their consumers on the food primarily. They might draw some customers away from other fast food places, but not from sit-down places like you’re talking about

Absolutely the hardest part was the shrinking. Most of the damage, I had access to both sides of the panel. Which means you can use a hammer and a block thing called a dolly. But you have to hold the dolly on one side and hammer on the other. Which is awkward as hell. It’s slow work, or was for me; I suppose a pro can go faster. And you have to be careful because if you overdo it, you can end up hardening the metal and end up with cracks.

All the videos and tutorials say to practice on some scrap sheet metal, but I didn’t have any, so it was trial by fire.

This was back in the summer, but my left shoulder is still being pissy about the positions I was in to reach the dolly to the middle of the roof and still see what I was hitting with the hammer.

Tbh though, it was much simpler than I thought. There’s plenty of good tutorials out there,and the concepts aren’t complicated at all, it’s the skill that’s fiddly and detailed.

Yup, you pronounce a plural or possessive of a word that ends in S with the es or 's like Travises.

However, you don’t usually pronounce an 's after a plural. A single Travis that owns something would be pronounced Travises. If you are referring to a family with the surname Travis, as a group, it’s the Travises. However, if the Travises own something, it will be the Travises property, not the Traviseses property.

Whether or not you write the possessive plural as Travises’ or not seems to be a matter of debate. I do. Some rules dictate that you would write the singular possessive as Travis’ and say it Travises, others would have it written as Travis’s