Barelypoops Cacalags

Lawyer, engineer, or consultant? LOL, are you McKinsey advising Warner/Discovery?!?!?

…and Florida, and Jamaica, and Mexico, and (I presume) Spain. There is no corner of the earth in which the English will not challenge the mighty Helios until they are as red as the cross of St. George.

What are we going to do tonight, Brain?!

If it’s within your means, could y’all take a long trip out that way?

This is a very good idea, again, if they have means, though it’s probably not absurd if he’s looking to buy. AirBnB’s in Wyoming aren’t super common, but there are options, and frankly most of them are probably “easy mode” in the sense that they’re close to SOMETHING. Get a feel for what it would be like to be stuck there doing your shopping, finding something to eat, finding something to do. Drive to the nearest hospital, then imagine doing it frequently or while in a lot of pain.

Maybe it will be fine, even for ten or fifteen years, but they’re absolutely right to take this one slow and be wary. I know Massachusetts is pretty built up, but it’s not fully paved. I wonder if OP might float the idea of moving another 20-30 minutes farther out and finding a little patch of ground? Or doing something SUPER crazy like moving to New Hampshire? 🤣

As another alternative, if he’s determined to have mountains, something just outside Denver or even, sigh, Salt Lake City would blunt some of the biggest issues. Wyoming has almost literally nothing. Cheyenne metro has around 100k people, smaller than Lowell, MA.

Just to add, my very bookish aunt and uncle moved to the Appalachian foothills outside Charlotte after they both retired from government jobs in DC. After a couple of years of dealing with rural bullshit like annoying neighbors and poor infrastructure, they moved into suburban Charlotte and seem happier.

As everyone else has said, this is a pretty normal hangup, and if it’s really where you plan to live for the foreseeable future, only time will wear down the edges of that anxiety. It sounds like your parents raised you to be very open and you have an honest relationship with them and open invitation to live with them until you find a path that takes you elsewhere. Frankly, that’s great. My own daughter is a pre-teen but honestly I think we’re on a fairly similar path, but that’s more because it’s what feels like the right thing to do and the right way to treat someone, compared to the arbitrarily rigid households my wife and I grew up in. It doesn’t make make it magically not-alien.

It’s only been a month and he likely grew up in a different style of household. Honestly, in the US at least, the communities that most commonly do multi-generational living are very much not the ones okay with unmarried partners staying over. That’s a pretty significant cultural disconnect, and it’s going to be a while before he gets over it and truly believes that your parents are as okay with it as you claim. It’s probably going to require them to be almost comically over the top about it being okay (which has its own social hazards, LOL), or else it’s going to require baby steps. A trip together could help, as someone else mentioned. Or, a movie night that runs long and he stays in a spare bedroom. Eventually, with exposure and with a relationship between the two of you that proves to be solid over time, he may come to feel that it’s less awkward or disrespectful. He might also be a bit (overly?) self-conscious about the slight age difference in front of people whose primary job over the last 20 years has been keeping you safe.

So yeah, he’s sort of bringing his hangups into the relationship in a way you likely find frustrating, but I wouldn’t worry about it, certainly not until it’s been a good bit longer. It’s a common thing, coming from an honest place (and as mentioned, anxiety+expectations could create a lot of issues around the very intimacy you want to promote). In the meantime, it’s fairly easy to work around, especially since you do have the kind of relationship with your parents that makes staying at his place unremarkable. Eventually, yes, he should grow to trust you and your parents enough to believe you all when you say it’s fine, and if that’s still not enough then to have the kind of open conversation with you as his partner to understand why it’s not going to happen. For now, just keep doing things to make him comfortable at your place, but for the most part I’d let this one go.

As someone who grew up in the exact window of dysfunction that makes the movie relatable but not triggering, I agree.

Reception is a little fuzzy.

If I bowed out early, would that make me a Dik?

The part where the baby shoves their hand in your face when you can’t do anything about it is actually pretty accurate. The face you then make as the grown-up is also spot on.

Don Perlin on pencils. I originally thought John Romita Sr, but yeah, that jawline is a bit too dashing.

I agree that the idea they were teaching was “is it reasonable for 4/6 to be larger than 5/6”, but it was too sloppy to be in a word problem with cultural context. Sometimes if you’re the teacher and a kid stumbles onto a loophole this big, you have to take the L and update your materials for the next year. Just add, “Marty and Luis ordered small pizzas at Joe’s,” and this goes away. This feels like the question writer had been in a groove with drafting more abstract problem sets, and didn’t do a good job when shifting gears into the word problem section.

“Reasonableness” as the heading implies that they’ve been working on whether a word problem makes any sense at all. It’s, perhaps ironically, an attempt to help them build critical thinking skills. Then, elementary school teachers are not all brilliant minds themselves, and even the ones who are incredibly gifted educators are overworked, and their schools are generally underfunded. You get a cheap resource, maybe even a free one, or one your former mentor threw together late one night three years ago, and you can end up with a sloppy question. If you yourself are having a bad moment, or are not particularly talented, or the kid is a known shitass, then yeah, you could overreact and respond like this.

Having just sat with my kid through a year of 5th grade math homework, it is completely plausible that this is a real quiz and a real response. Some of the question writing even in the professionally made materials is just not good, partly because it presumes a laser focus on a single “instructional variable,” despite mandates to teach holistically.

Also, ngl, that’s pretty solid freehand sign routing.

It’s implied in the music.

My kiddo had a brief phase of watching these. They’re quite bad, but when cheap CGI cartoons result in plasticky textures and unnatural movement, I have to admit that using it on Barbie of all things is low-key clever.

Dagwood’s got a pretty nice table saw, though Mrs. Mullican needs to use the fence and a fuckin push-stick.

The old ZAZ movies were great because they knew to hang the constant gags on a plot that, threadbare as it was, made it a silly movie and not a tedious collection of parody sketches where the actors just don’t bother changing costumes.

The easy example is to think in terms of chatting with a Christian: Jesus died, but Jesus is not dead.