bolido_sentimental
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User ID: 205
bolido_sentimental
2d ago
I didn't meet my wife at church, but I've visited both a PCA Presbyterian church and a Southern Baptist church that had really substantial cohorts of 20somethings. For a while I attended an EFCA church (kind of a small, rather interesting denomination) that had only a handful of young women, but they were, for some reason, all staggeringly beautiful. I did successfully ask one of them out, but the date was kind of lame; but we parted as friends.
A related phenomenon: now that we're married, my wife and I don't have to try to find a church with young people, so we just go to the local church I like best. We are one of four couples below the age of 40; I can think of two eligible single girls there and one young man. It's a bit grim but we're trying to do outreach and things to make young people think it's worth a visit.
N = 1 but I just got married, and we waited until marriage. It definitely happens even now. I am personally acquainted with at least three other couples that were the same.
Caveat: we are all religious though. I don't know if there are non-religious people who would be interested in waiting, but I would think it's very rare at this point.
bolido_sentimental
7d ago
I've gone on drives recently where I counted the number of other drivers I could see on the road who had their smartphone in their hand. It usually only takes me a couple of miles or so to get into the double-digits. I understand that defensive driving has always been necessary, but when I first started driving it didn't feel as much like every journey was a potential accident.
bolido_sentimental
10d ago
Lutheran (LCMS) out in the suburbs of a large Midwestern city. We have a large and lovely church building next to one of the area's most popular parks. However, the historical path of our congregation is that it boomed as the suburbs around it sprung up in the 1960s, and was very full for decades; but as that generation died off, the Gen X and Millennials that replaced them did not then start attending in their place.
It is a struggle to be in an area, as we are, with stable, not growing, population. And we're not near a big shopping center, apartment block or anything. I think all the time about how we could do more effective outreach. But our pastor is about to retire, and - as many on X have complained about in their own churches - didn't give a sermon on Sunday that would fire anyone up. Didn't mention Charlie at all. So I wonder if visitors will just turn around and think, "Nothing special here."
(I love Pastor, he's just winding down. He is very effective in many areas of his work. I just wish he would take on what's going in the world more often.)
bolido_sentimental
10d ago
Glaziers?
bolido_sentimental
10d ago
Depressing individual anecdote: I did not see even one new visitor at my church. We definitely need to figure out how to get our name out there more.
bolido_sentimental
11d ago
I appreciate the detailed answer. I live in Ohio, where there haven't really been any since the time of Anthony Wayne. I have a sense that, as with things like the Celtic Revival, Chinoiserie, etc., there was a period in the 20th century where there was, for a time, a broader cultural interest in "Indian" things; but this has waned, and now they don't seem to have any particular presence in the wider cultural arena. I don't think I can name any living Native Americans. Perhaps the absolute number simply isn't high enough. So I just find myself curious about - what are their politics? What are their unique subcultural practices in 2025? How did the Internet change their lives? In America you see things like Chinese laundries, Hispanic roofing crews, Vietnamese nail salons; apart from casinos, do the Native Americans have some thing like that? Perhaps I'd just have to go and see.
But as you note, the experiences of Native Americans in Florida vs. Oklahoma vs. Alaska are so different that it may not even be worthwhile to think of them as a single bloc.
bolido_sentimental
11d ago
Do any of you spend any time with or around Native Americans? What are they up to these days?
I've been reading the 1970s novels of James Welch, which describe the modern lives of Native Americans living in Montana and other places; and that's the most up to date information I have. I guess I wonder if they've been absorbed into atomized individualism, if they still have a big alcohol problem, if there are any interesting cultural developments in general.
(In Welch's novels, I would say they've already been partially consumed by the main stream of American life, suffering from a wistfulness and purposelessness that may only partly stem from the loss of tribal structure and power over the land, and which may just as much originate in the inherent pointlessness of American working-class life as some then saw it.)
bolido_sentimental
11d ago
I think Remains of the Day is even better. One of my top 3 or 4 novels.
bolido_sentimental
21d ago
Mottizens: do you have a good relationship with your parents? More specifically: do you try to make them proud and live up to values they inculcated in you? Or do you think about failings they had, and try to orient your life toward avoiding those?
Found myself wondering about this yesterday, how in some cases you have children who strive to continue the sort of life their parents led (e.g., multigenerational families I see at church), and in other cases you get total rebellion, children who want to be as little like their parents as possible and adopt opposite positions to what they were raised with.
Thinking about my own case, it's a little bit strange in that it never felt like my parents steered me towards any particular mode of living. I try to be like my dad in certain respects: taking responsibility for things, trying to solve one's own problems with one's own resources, managing money carefully and thoughtfully. My mom is just sort of a pleasant, rather daffy woman who lives a very simple life and isn't trying to impact the world in any way. I observe that neither of them are especially opinionated, and neither am I; they are casual, moderate, Clinton-type liberals and I've gone more conservative, but it's not something we ever fight about - they don't go into arguments about "issues" and don't mind people disagreeing with them. In general it's like they're just sort in the middle of most types of bell curves; even if I were of some rebellious nature, they aren't polar enough about anything for me to take up the opposite pole.
bolido_sentimental
1mo ago
How do you feel about your personality, currently? Do you make friends easily, or have many satisfying relationships with other people?
I'm not implying that you lack those things, I'm just curious about your self-perception of them.
bolido_sentimental
1mo ago
Often I understand a book differently because of the way I've changed in the intervening years. Sometimes I enjoy it much more, sometimes much less.
Also, after 10 years or so I've often forgotten much of what happened. So, for books where I remember there being some wonderful, moving scene, I can re-read it knowing I have something good in store, but not clearly remembering what it was.
bolido_sentimental
1mo ago
We're around the same age and I've been considering the same question. Like others have said, it's basically a question of taking whatever skills you have to whatever the largest employer is. If I were going to try and move to Muncie, Indiana, then I'd try and see what kind of jobs I could get at Ball State University, or at the Magna plant. If you're IT (like I am), you see what MSPs serve the area and see if they need an engineer, or you try and get on as a sysadmin at whatever businesses there are.
Career paths - as you note, you're kind of locked in with what you've got unless you want to learn a new skill. My barber says he'd train the right person from scratch if he liked him. Every town has lawyers, every town has accountants, every town has police, every town has clergy; but it's hard to transition into one of those things without being ready to change your life tremendously. Nevertheless I have been thinking about it anyway.
bolido_sentimental
1mo ago
I like to use it to get summary answers to questions which would otherwise require me to read many different sources. For example you might ask it, "What was it like to work as a police officer in Portsmouth, OH in 1954?" There may be no single article that describes this, but the AI will paint a plausible picture if you ask it to, and will fill in a number of details you might not think of on your own.
It works well in this application because I don't need hard facts or a working solution to a problem; I want a general idea and it gives me quite a full one.
bolido_sentimental
1mo ago
The earliest I clearly remember it is reading SSC on my breaks when I was teaching English in Korea in 2013. I was 24 years old then, and it was kind of my first exposure to serious current thought outside the left-liberal bubble. In those days I had a legit Tumblrina girlfriend; I felt like some of the things she believed were crazy, but I had no real idea of what else it was possible to believe. I think that's more or less how I started digging into the culture war.
Something I somewhat lament is that I've never gotten into top-level posting, even though I've wanted to; I think I have quite low argumentativeness. (There's probably a better name for this quality.) When I read something online that I disagree with, I just go, "Ah, interesting;" I don't have that urge to push back, correct, or give alternate perspectives. I think this is mostly just my personality, but also from engaging with bad-faith interlocutors when I was a teenager and concluding that Internet arguments are pointless. However, I also sometimes think that my failure to post is actually an indication that I don't pay much attention to or think much about the world around me.
But anyway, yeah, I've checked the Motte probably every day since it was created, with only very occasional interludes when I'm on a plane or something; and I was on the culture war subreddits way back when as well.
bolido_sentimental
1mo ago
I went to a baseball watch party at a brewery in the neighborhood, and she was there. To my surprise there was actually a roughly equal gender ratio. It was easy enough to just chat her up given the shared interest which was the premise of the event.
While I had occasional success when I was a young man with meeting true strangers in public settings ("cold approaches" as this is known), I always did much better with what I guess you might call "warm approaches" - friends of friends, interest groups, mixers, small house parties, and other settings where talking to one another is accepted and expected.
I am a serious chess nerd, and to be honest, I enjoy it purely as an end in itself. I don't think it's making me smarter or better at anything - I just really like chess, and so I play it and study it because it's fun. It brings me great happiness to have something like that.
I wonder if this is sort of a luxury of the middle-aged: I do not need to be getting better at "real" skills to give myself a shot in life, because I'm married, mid-career and so on. It certainly would be more valuable to do something else with her time from that perspective. But it's not as useless as some other things. Like others have said, it's socially acceptable and even cool to some people; and it is certainly possible to meet folks and make friends (admittedly odd ones) through it.
bolido_sentimental
2mo ago
This was hard for me to accept when I was dating, but accept it I ultimately did; it's true and you're right to point it out. I eventually resolved this for myself by leaving the apps and going back to the old-fashioned way, as I concluded through years of experience that I myself was not willing to partner up with someone with such divergent values. In the past I was occasionally able to pull liberal girls closer to the center or right, but I am much happier to finally be with an actual conservative; it is a great blessing to not constantly be hiding my power level anymore.
bolido_sentimental
3mo ago
Have any of you ever memorized poems? I understand this is something that used to happen in school at least at one time, but I wonder if it died out entirely.
If so - did you find it worth doing? Or, indeed, the memorization of anything else? (Not referring in this case, to, e.g., the endless Anki decks of medical school, or all of the TCP/UDP ports for your CCNA, but rather just for fun.)
bolido_sentimental
3mo ago
There's always geocaching.
https://www.geocaching.com/play
Can help you look at your environment in a new way, and also creates a nifty record of all the places you've been.
bolido_sentimental
4mo ago
I didn't know you had a blog. Where can we read it?
bolido_sentimental
5mo ago
I didn't really appreciate what he did when I was a young adult. I was a real whiz kid in school, and it seemed a shame not to use the scholarships and get out into the world that way. In hindsight I might have chosen differently, and now I have a whole mid-level career's worth of sunk cost that would make it probably too challenging to switch.
I think he'd be more than happy to sell all his stuff and his book of business in a few years for a nominal cost, if he knew the right person to take it over; but he's quite solitary and prefers to work alone, so it's unfortunately possible that his knowledge will die with him. Maybe I'll talk to him about trying to find an apprentice.
My father has been a glazier for 40 years, and I've worked with him on occasional jobs here and there. He is self-employed, and primarily does storefront windows and doors for restaurants, banks, retail, offices, etc.
Pros:
- Nothing gross about it really. All metal and glass. Sawdust, metal shavings, etc., but nothing unsanitary.
- In growing areas the demand is tremendous. It's a somewhat uncommon trade skill, but required in damn near every building everywhere. For many corporate clients, if you can get on their approved vendor list you can basically name your price, and they'll pay it without blinking.
- Pretty high-precision/high-craft. Not mindless at all. Lots of practical problem-solving. Your work may be beautiful. You can drive around your city and point at all kinds of buildings and say, "I did part of that."
- You go all over town or your region each day - no being chained to a desk. But your range wouldn't typically be more than a couple hours from home.
- Don't have to work for a company or with anyone else if you don't want to. The most he does is occasionally hire laborers to help move very large things.
Cons:
- Glass and metal are sharp and can be dangerous. You really have to take safety seriously. People do get seriously injured or die in this line of work, but it doesn't have to be you.
- Shit is heavy. Glass is just very heavy. Finished units are heavier still. A lot is mitigated by various simple machines, carts, dollies, and so on, but there will be times when you must shift some big thing around a corner with muscle force, and you'll feel it the next day. Having said that, my dad is in his 60s and still has all his functions, and tells me he has no unusual daily pain.
- There is often work at heights, potentially extreme ones, usually on scaffolding. Wear the safety harness. And of course you'll certainly be outside in the heat and cold.
- It's a potentially hard skill to pick up, in that you either have to get someone to teach it to you, or work for a company doing the scut work for a couple of years while you learn. No legible credentials (in non-union states anyway), which may be good or bad depending on your perspective.
I can say I would be quite happy if children of mine went into it. It's honest work and actually quite deep and interesting.
bolido_sentimental
5mo ago
I would commend to you El Astillero (The Shipyard) by Juan Carlos Onetti. One of my personal favorite books.
I would by no means tell you to go to church again if that's not something you're interested in; but I would note that at least according to my understanding, there's no expectation of perfection. I've had my own challenges with masturbation and many other things. We confess that we're sinners in every Sunday service, and we do mean it. All of which is to say, I doubt that you're actually too fucked up to succeed in a relationship. Those of us that are in them are very flawed, come from many weird and conflicting backgrounds, and make various compromises. Even the most perfect-seeming trads deal with all kinds of doubts, inner demons, and guilt about things they can't go back and change.
Anyway, you can continue changing and growing. I didn't marry until I was 35, and if I look back on it, I think that's the way that it had to be for it to work out for me. I had to find my own resolutions to some things which felt irreconciliable.
Hope you do post in Wellness Wednesday, will be looking forward to it.
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