solowingpixy
the resident car guy
No bio...
User ID: 410
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
9mo ago
I misread your comment (and extend my apologies). I don't think Cruz wins (He's way creepier than J.D. Vance.), but I misread the comment.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
9mo ago
Bush wouldn't have focused on immigration, though, because Bush is pro-immigration (as was his brother, as was his father, as was Reagan) and would rather lose and tank the GOP for a generation with it than run against immigration.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
9mo ago
Update:
The roommate is gone, as is his annoying not housebroken dog. Kicking him out wasn’t as hard as I’d expected, and that fact leaves me with more self-recrimination than relief. I aggravated an ankle and pulled some muscle or ligament in my hip moving his bariatric chair out of my place but that was worth it (and both are progressively hurting less day by day such that I’m confident that I didn’t hurt anything serious; I’m just on the wrong side of thirty and out of shape so these things happen when lifting heavy things and moving them in weird ways) I should have done this years ago and my failure to do so cost me an enormous amount of money. I take no relish in the situation I’ve exiled him to (a tenuous couch surfing situation in a cluttered up house that smells in a way that just stresses me out the moment I walk in the door, and I am pretty lazy/lenient about cleanliness.), but I had to do it. My obligations toward him ended long ago, I have to defend myself, and I’ll leave it at that. He muttered something about contacting his family up north and that’ll probably be the correct course of action for him to take.
I’m relaxing right now with my door open, cats going in and out, and the A/C turned off like I like it (I’m bad about forgetting to turn the A/C back on and he’d pitch a fit about it.). The last week or so has been a rough mess of feeling badly emotionally dysregulated but as I’m typing this I feel like I’m on the other side of it and past the worst of it. If everything goes right and I don’t happen upon anything better to do I plan on renting a carpet cleaner and deep-cleaning the apartment over the weekend.
This is what winning looks like. Maybe I don’t have it in me to feel satisfaction or elation over finally fixing my own fuckup but I do feel relief. I feel at peace. I appreciate everyone here (and my IRL friends) who pushed me to quit putting off/tolerating things and get rid of him. To my buddy RJ in particular, you don't owe me shit. Sure, I covered a $70 or so tab and stayed out with you on Sunday night till the bars closed against my better judgment but you busted your ass helping me move his stuff with little notice. You're a true friend and I'll never forget that.
IMO people will keep saying "Get a Honda/Toyota" as long as 15-20 year old Corollas and Civics (and Camrys/Accords) are still superior to their competition, and IMO they mostly still are (With that, IMO some Ford and GM models are underrated.). Reputations will remain stickier as the average car continues to get older, and the average vehicle in the US is nearly 13 years old (and the average car is 14 years old!).
With that, for Chrysler it wasn't just the 2.7 V6, but the Neons that blew headgaskets, 4 speed auto transmissions made out of paper mache throughout the 90s and early 2000s, LH and cloud cars that just fell apart in a hurry, and pickup trucks that, Cummins diesels aside, are the worst of the big three (They're nice, but they fall apart fast and have relatively poor resale value.). The 300s/Challengers/Chargers are reliable as far as I'm aware, but guzzle gas so they aren't really economical and are police magnets in certain areas.
Subaru IMO is unique enough (AWD in all their cars) that their customers are willing to tolerate issues like the EJ's headgaskets that other brands couldn't get away with. VW/Audi IMO have improved a lot since the crap they were churning out in the early 2000s, and German car buyers are less sensitive about long-term reliability since they are the most likely to lease their vehicles instead of buying them.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
10mo ago
Eh, I'm a bit more sanguine. Firstly, Trump supporters were probably high on copium before the candidate switch, and even Biden probably could have tightened things up a bit before the election.
Vance is disappointingly bad at message discipline (Please don't publicly project your mommy issues into your politics about women!) and the "hillbilly who made it out" schtick can be grating (I say this is someone from a close enough background that I I want to like him, but it comes across as less sincere than it probably is.), but it's entirely possible that the Democrats will stoop to their level and be emotionally indulgent with their own VP pick (Mayor Pete or Beshear, also a possibility that 2028 frontrunners are trying to stay out of it.) and in the end I don't think VP matters much or that Trump had a slam dunk option (DeSantis isn't any less awkward at Trump's style of campaigning.). It could have been worse; he could have picked Tommy Tuberville.
Harris will definitely be better at fundraising than Biden was, but I'm not sure how much that moves the needle on its own. She will definitely supercharge enthusiasm among the media, college educated women, etc. but those are the groups that needed the least persuasion in the first place and were unlikely to forget to vote or defect to Trump. Harris remains relatively untested at things that aren't intra Democratic Party politics and is likely to remain weak in the Midwestern swing states that actually matter for winning the electoral college. The Trump campaign can hit her for things she said during the 2020 primary while trying to outflank Biden from the left.
I expect polls to tighten up and that Harris will definitely get a DNC bounce, but we'll know more in a few weeks to a month where things really stand. With that, as much as I wanted DeSantis the first place I don't think he would be running away with this either. Presidential elections are hard and Republicans being bad at winning them has been an issue for them since Reagan was no longer leading the charge.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
10mo ago
There probably are better bars, and it also depends on what time you're going in. Happy hour is usually going to be a bunch of old men (who can be surprisingly cliquish!) and if you're lucky people 35-55 in for a drink or few after work (These can make for decent conversation.). The younger crowd are rarely going to be there before 9-10PM.
With that, I work at a bar (a cocktail bar that's more divey than it wishes it was) in a college town where the night shift mostly caters to grad students (Well, it wishes it could get more grad students in.), millennial hipsters, and the occasional disgruntled faculty members and actual, interesting conversations can be hard to come by. It's not so much that people aren't willing to talk to strangers (This does vary by age; Gen X and up are more receptive to this and Millennials and Gen Z less so.) as the fact that they usually go out with their spouse or in friend groups that take up most/all of their attention (This is especially true of Millennial/Gen Z women, who tend to go out in groups to avoid conversations with unattached men.). The vast majority of the single unaccompanied patrons are single men that are varying degrees of loser. Working at a bar will improve your social/conversational skills and I imagine that being a patron could as well but unless you enjoy drinking first and foremost it's IMO a really inefficient way to meet people and make friends. At least, it is at the place I work at and the other bars in town are either the same or worse (clientele I don't like, too loud to talk, too dead, etc.). Most of the time it's either the same regulars I deal with (and as bad as the alcoholics can be, the weirdos who don't drink are worse) either every shift or at least once a week or, worse, the place gets taken over by over-40s out for the weekend/for some nearby event that I have little to no interest in talking to. When I was working there consistently I'd say that I had a genuinely interesting conversation with someone new or who wasn't a regular once every 4-6 weeks.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
10mo ago
Maybe it's generational
In my experiences working at a bar, it's definitely generational. Gen X and older of both sexes are vastly more receptive to conversations with strangers than millennials and younger. In particular, young women tend to go out in friend groups that aren't all that welcoming to outsiders, meaning that the rare unaccompanied young woman that is receptive to conversations tends to immediately become the subject of competition for the attention of every single man in the place.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
10mo ago
As someone whose life story was a bit like Vance's (except in rural north Alabama instead of small town southern Ohio), it's weird. I grew up not really fitting in with the place (was too much of a nerd) and as an adult would rather hang out at the bar with your average blue tribe dilettante (I really like smart right wingers and or grey tribe types, but they're rare in my local college town social scene and or keep their mouths shut. I'd much rather talk to a liberal lawyer/law student than some low-info Boomer Gen X Reaganite or Trumper who hasn't updated their talking points since the 1990s.) than your local rednecks (I can talk enough about cars and football to fit in, though, and one of our regulars was impressed that I was the first non-tradesperson he'd met who knew what a glazier is.), but I don't really share their values. Somehow, in spite of not having been raised in the church, I turned out a fairly conservative person. I don't know what separates me from the average hicklib (There are plenty of those to be found in an SEC college town scene.), but at some point in my late teens/early 20s I felt it necessary to forgive my classmates for not having accepted me, to thank my teachers for what they did do, and while I'm not a churchgoer I've made my peace with God. Most of the people in the ruralville I'm from are decent and mean well, and as for the ones who aren't, there's trash everywhere I guess.
As for the borderer stuff, I don't know if Vance was or wasn't hamming some things up (The gist of his family having been part of the Great Migration strikes me as accurate, and while my father's side aren't from Appalachia they did migrate from the south to the rust belt and have been badly hurt by that area's economic decline and their own dysfunctions. My mom's side were the hillbillies, and apparently meeting them was something of a culture shock to my dad who'd grown up middle class in the Midwest.), but he nailed the toxic push-pull relationship between Mom and Mamaw (I do not believe that he was lying about that.) such that I was unprepared for that trip down memory lane and spent some time in tears.
I will say that I sympathize deeply with Vance's reactionary streak, even if I'm not sure (and I don't know if he's sure either) what the answer is.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
10mo ago
It's a weirdly hopeful message- you have the power to stop sucking and turn things around!
Right. He spends much of the book complaining about his mother being a dysfunctional addict (and life being made much harder than it had to be by bad financial decisions rather than real poverty), but apparently she sobered up (Maybe the book was a wake-up call?) and they reconciled. He brought her to the RNC and bragged to the crowd that she's nearing 10 years sober, suggesting that she should celebrate her 10 year anniversary at the White House.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
11mo ago
Correct. In the dying rural area where I'm from (in north Alabama, not southern Ohio), the Silent generation was the last really "normal" generation that mostly stuck around even though they mostly transitioned from farming to working in factories (I had several relatives who ran vestigial hobby farms in their spare time/retirements.). Boomers and onwards tended to move to suburbs closer to where the jobs/amenities were (and even Huntsville starting to get expensive hasn't revitalized the area where I'm from yet; it seems to be sprawling northward and I grew up on the other side of the river) such that my neck of the woods started dying in the 70s and was a sitting duck in the 2000s for the meth epidemic to take over and turn what was left into a white trashville as the retired Silents sat in their houses and wondered what the Hell went wrong.
With that, my other side of the family wound up in a crappy part of the rust belt thanks to the Great Migration (My grandparents also took part, but returned home and eventually George Wallace brought a GM factory to us for my grandfather to work at. My parents met each other in the Marines because the military was how Gen X got out of dodge.) and it's striking A. how much worse off my Millennial cousins are up there than mine from Alabama and B. how low the standards are up there. Like, I'm a fuckup by the standards of being college educated but I have a full time job, pay my own bills, have never had a problem with illegal drugs, and haven't been to jail so to them I'm a success. Maybe they were just worse to start with and my dad was the outlier success story on their side and my mom one of the worst on her side (Her sister was very much like J.D. Vance's mom from Hillbilly Elegy. Mom was...a cartoon villain tier psycho who put on an epic of domestic violence and dead pets.) but it's depressing nevertheless.
As for aggressively anti-social behavior, I did find it amusing that once Mom moved to a city with actual police it didn't take her long to start winding up in jail for her bullshit (Twice in a year, once for domestic violence and once for stealing from her job.). Luckily she finally succeeded in her decade-long quest to draw disability and now gets something like 90% disability from the VA, so she's not really my problem anymore and can go around making a mockery of "disabled veteran" (Lol the local diversion program for disabled veterans did spare her quite a bit of jail time for that DV charge. Apparently that wasn't her first offense for that, to which I can only reply "no shit".) with all the plate and stickers on her car.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
11mo ago
The closest you're going to get is that pharma companies are fundamentally in the business of solving their patients' pain issues (the "doing good" part), that the opiod overdose crisis is unrelated to this, and that overdose deaths aren't correlated with prescription rates. In short, Richard Lawhern is arguing that we have an overdose crisis A. because synthetic opioids that became pervasive in street drugs during the 2010s have a very low margin for user error and B. we have too many people suffering from something akin to shit life syndrome.
Perhaps a good sanity check would be to check on non-opioid problems with addiction. Say what you want about the Sacklers, but they aren't in the food and beverage industry, and thus can't plausibly be blamed for the rise in alcohol deaths or 10% of Americans being morbidly obese.
I don't want to live in a world with more pillheads, think that full libertarian wet dream drug legalization would be a disaster (It would almost certainly lower the death rate among active drug users, but you'd almost certainly get a lot more users, as happened with Marijuana legalization.), and even accept that crucifying the Sacklers may be a societally necessary action, but I'm not convinced that Oxycontin in particular is what broke everything.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
11mo ago
Here you go, courtesy of Jacob Sullum writing for the libertarian Reason Magazine. Amusingly, the one wrongdoing he accuses Purdue Pharma of committing was reformulating the drug to make it harder to abuse, which was correlated with an increase in overdose deaths.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
11mo ago
It's been rough (especially anxiety-wise, but this isn't my first rodeo there and I'm reasonably competent at dealing with it at this point in life) but I'm hanging in there and am calmer about the situation than last week. My job situation is not what I want it to be but is not an outright emergency (I can string together enough delivery and bartending shifts on top of it to keep the bills paid.) so I can backburn that problem while I get the roommate situation dealt with and have a backup plan there that'll open up in a few months.
I am dreading the process of kicking the roommate out (He may legitimately have nowhere to go due to having burned every bridge, and if that's the case or close to it I expect much wailing and gnashing of teeth.), but he has more than overstayed his welcome and done less than nothing with the frankly embarrassing amount of aid I've directly or indirectly sent his way. His health problems are unfortunate but his refusal to manage them is not my fault or responsibility (nor is his failure to find welfare or employment), and allowing him to stay here is tolerating an incorrigible leech at best and putting myself at risk of being conscripted into caregiving at worst. I really thought I could help this guy and all I wound up doing was enabling his self-destructive bullshit.
As far as friendship goes (and this is something I'm going to have to work on after this is over so that I don't find myself in a re-run of this situation), I had a bad habit through my 20s of picking up "friends" who really just appreciated my being useful and disappeared/drifted away when I quit loaning them money, fixing their car, etc. If the only thing you value in yourself is being useful then you'll develop a knack for finding people who will exploit this mercilessly, and this roommate is merely somewhere between grandfathered in from the past and the worst case of all of them. It has to end, and I am not obligated to let this guy stay at my place until he dies because of whatever went wrong in his life that isn't my fault.
To be honest, whatever pity or desire I had to help him at this point has been overcome by disgust, at him for his shameless freeloading and refusal to even try and get his shit together and toward myself for having tolerated it for so long. I will not let anger get the better of myself when dealing with him but I cannot and will not continue to tolerate this. This won't be an ultimatum or intervention, just a statement of fact: "You need to leave."
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
11mo ago
You have to remember that close to 10% of Americans are morbidly obese, and as with alcohol consumption the heavy users drag up the average (It's more dramatic with alcohol, but there are vastly more severely obese people than anorexics.). On that note, the "10th decile drinkers drink 10 drinks a day" is probably an overstatement, but 10th decile drinkers still likely consume far too much.
My roommate's diet is simultaneously infuriating (He's literally going to eat himself into being bedbound at this rate and that much fast food has to cost a ton of money.) and sad (Binge Eating Disorder is a thing.). I get that it's really easy to become overweight or obese (Otherwise most people wouldn't be one or the other.), but to get your BMI over 40 or 50 takes work (unless you're really short and inactive, I suppose).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
11mo ago
A brief update to the roommate situation:
I have decided that I will kick him out, but this will need to be delayed for a few (as in three) weeks while I conclude the lease on the old place he was living at: get the last of the stuff out, keys turned in, power turned off, etc. If I were to give him notice now there's a chance that he would try to move back in there and squat after the lease ends, in which case I could be held liable for having had an additional tenant living there off the lease, and I don't want to get sued. I don't think that he would do that, but I am afraid that he would and I'm not sure if that's reflective of the level of scumbag I've tolerated over the last few years or the level of paranoia/dread with which I approach interpersonal conflict. I am less afraid that he will pitch a fit and punch a bunch of holes in my walls or whatever, if only because he'll run out of breath in 30 seconds. I consider it likely that he will threaten to commit suicide but unlikely that he will attempt it in a violent enough fashion to succeed. He can say whatever he wants to his friends about what an asshole I am, but it doesn't matter because most of them are ~15 years older than I am and the ones that know both of us will understand why I am doing this.
It is my understanding that per my state's laws his living with me sans paperwork is considered an informal month to month lease that can be terminated without cause with 30 days written notice (which can be hand delivered by myself, no need to have it served). If he fails to vacate by then I can then sue to have him evicted. If worst comes to worst I will ask my landlord to have him evicted at whatever price that may cost (Conveniently, my landlord is an old lady who likes me, and she knows about this roommate, so I don't think she'll elect to evict both of us.). My worst case scenario resort is to exercise the fact that my lease is month to month at this point, so I could just move and leave him there to be evicted. I don't want to do that because I'm paying below market for a nice apartment in a great location but I'll do it if I have to.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
11mo ago
In my experience, the main draw to addressing diet is either A: Culling excessive calorie intake and running a big enough deficit is a way to lose weight quickly, and it's easier to stay motivated when I see fast results. or B: My diet has become so bereft of nutrition that my lack of energy is interfering with my daily life (My job is fairly physical.).
I've bounced between "average overweight American" and "really fast weight loss" (My personal record is 25lbs in six weeks, starting at a BMI of 28.) more times than I can count, invariably prompted by something setting off my anxiety such that I totally lose my appetite (I suppose that being in a permanently agitated state might burn more calories than being calm, but surely not that many.). It's horribly unhealthy to have the majority or entirety of my calories come from Mountain Dew Voltage (If they made a sugar-free version I'd switch, but that's not what the Circle K is selling at 79 cents for a 44 ounce.) and alcoholic beverages (Oh, and you'll drink less and get more bang for your buck because the perpetually empty stomach and weight loss will wreck your alcohol tolerance. This can be dangerous when trying to have a fun night out.), but from the perspective of the scale it's almost amusing effective.
I'm actually kind of annoyed tonight because I went through the effort of acquiring a dinner that I was looking forward to/ meal prepping for the next few days and then barely ate any of it before getting too full to continue. I don't know if the stomach really shrinks after a few months of food restriction, being excessively tense tightens something around the stomach, or what, but when I get like this I have to force myself to eat at all or I'll go days without eating (By day three I'll hit a wall, run out of energy, and get really cold.). Oh well, I ate enough that the fat soluble vitamins should take, can refrigerate the leftovers, and I can always freeze the stuff I prepped.
My favorite bit of American puritanism (while not raised a churchgoer, I grew up in a churchy enough place that the values rubbed off on me) is that I refuse to take OTC anything to medicate a hangover. Hangovers are to be endured as penance for excess. With that, there is the very real thing that if you have anything like an excessive drinking habit you probably shouldn't touch Tylenol because combining liver killers is a bad idea.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
11mo ago
"You can't outrun a bad diet." generally refers to excessive calorie intake above all else, and while you might think/feel like you're consuming a lot at 3,000 kcals a day you've got to think bigger. A quick google search suggests that your average American (who is overweight if not obese) consumes 3600 calories a day, so you're eating less than the average American and probably in the top 1% among them for physical activity.
I promise you can't outrun my obese roommate's diet, which I've started to occasionally observe as the fast food trash clogs up my kitchen trashcan. Some bangers from the last week: Thursday's lunch was a 20 piece McNuggets, three double cheeseburgers, and two medium fries from McDonald's (about 2800 calories). He came home from the bar with a Taco Bell bag later that night. Saturday night's dinner was eight 3 cheese chicken flatbread melts from Taco Bell along with a 7.75 oz bag of potato chips (about 3900 calories in total).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
11mo ago
Nah, I'm going to be alright. I'm just going to have to pay my taxes late because the money I had allocated toward that got eaten up by a big car repair (engine replacement due to a cracked block, but the car is fixed and should be reliable for quite some time now with minor to moderate work in the future that I can DIY on weekends). It's not a big deal, as IRS penalties and interest are much lower than, say, credit card interest. I'm just militant/nervy about money as a habit due to growing up in a spendthrift household with perpetual financial crises, and in a temporary crunch while I'm waiting for my belt-tightening to render fruit that I've known was going to suck for awhile.
If worst comes to worst, I can make it with the new job, University to Go dinner shifts once the dog days of summer in a college town are over, and picking up a bartending or door shift here and there, but I was just disappointed because I came into the new job feeling like I was taking a step forward and it's a sidestep at best.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
11mo ago
You're not wrong. In my experience most people, fat or thin, either lack perspective on what they eat or are sufficiently ignorant of nutrition/serving sizes such that they don't even know what they're eating and drinking (Fun fact: one of my favorite IPAs from back in the day is 250 calories per 12 ounce bottle, so we're talking 1500 calories for a six-pack.). Morbid obesity is just a different magnitude of scale.
With that, the "one true diet" in my experience is something that is sustainable enough to stick to but excludes whatever category of food that the given person is prone to overconsuming. So, keto or low carb diets work not so much due to ketosis or gluten sensitivity or whatever but because their restrictions exclude pretty much any pre-prepared junk/restaurant food (I guess you could get fat on pork rinds from gas stations, but I think that would take work after awhile.) that's calorie-dense and easy to acquire.
One of my favorite quotes on dieting came from a military history professor I had as an undergraduate: "If calorie restriction didn't work to induce weight loss, people wouldn't die of starvation in sieges."
The only thin women I've met who will admit to not eating a lot are the ones complaining about their eating disorders. The one I was thinking of when typing the last sentence breaks my heart.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
11mo ago
You know this already, but the answers to "Is he trying to help himself?", "Would I expect a friend letting me stay at their place to put up with this level of shit?", and "Would I do this to someone I call a friend?" are all no. I've had other friends in bad situations with broken decision making ability and they might've taken forever to repay loans, toed the line of "only calls me when his car breaks down", or whatever but they always did repay me eventually. I at least have the excuse of the first roommate being a woman that I was once very madly in love with. This guy doesn't respect himself enough to quit his slow-motion suicide in spite of a litany of friends who've tried to help him. I've done my damnedest to help, given him an insanely long leash, and he can't even be bothered to hustle and grind for welfare benefits, find some bullshit low-paying remote job, or even try to take care of his health, let alone repay me.
Fresh out of a brutal intervention on this subject from an IRL friend I arrived home and was asked to help make his bed (aka. just do it myself because that's faster) tomorrow because his knee hurts too much to move. Like, holy fuck, if you're that hard up you need to be in a nursing home and your needs are flat out beyond my ability to help, forget questions about deserving. We're reaching "I feel the need to defend myself" territory. If I let this fester I'm going to wind up a live-in caretaker and I'm genuinely afraid of what that would provoke from me in terms of anger and resentment.
He's lived here less than 30 days and isn't on the lease so there shouldn't be any legal issues. He'll be getting an eviction notice within a week. When talking with friends earlier I predicted based on my educated guesses that absent change he'll be bedridden within 6-24 months. If he's asking me to make his bed two weeks in that prediction might've been optimistic. My apartment is not a nursing home, end of story.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
11mo ago
The dog gets walked when he goes to the bar (which is whenever he can afford it/find someone to pay his tab and physically make it there) and lets it wander around, but otherwise rarely to never. Because of this, it isn't housebroken (He just puts down puppy pads even though the dog is 8 years old.). I know it isn't the dog's fault, but I hate that thing (and people who don't take proper care of their dogs, which is a lot of them). At least it can play with my cats now (The last roommate wanted a puppy and I put my foot down and refused, having correctly surmised that I would wind up caring for it. I think her cat has lived with me for two years now. Cats are relatively low-maintenance so long as you sterilize them and don't wind up with a bunch of kittens.).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
11mo ago
I really didn't know before I lived with him. Like, I've been average Amerifat on and off (have gained and lost the same 30ish pounds several times since being the fat kid who lost the weight after high school) but morbid obesity is a different game. Like, I've seen him take down a 14 inch stuffed crust pizza with a quart of milk in 20 minutes. I hear obvious bullshit like "I haven't eaten in days". (I have gone days without eating because stressed out me loses all appetite and when that happens I lose weight fast even while guzzling full sugar soda and alcoholic beverages.) or "This pizza is the first bad thing I've eaten in two weeks, so my diet shouldn't be causing my joint problems" (Again, bullshit. You told me that you went to the Chinese buffet last week, I've never seen you cook or eat a vegetable, I see the junk food wrappers/boxes in the trash, and you forgot to mention the full order of cheezy bread that you took down with that pizza.) and don't even have a response. At least every drunk I've known doesn't pretend that their hangover came from nowhere.
One of my siblings is living her 400lb life and it's fucking depressing.
I don't know if addiction causes people to lose their tolerance for discomfort or if the low tolerance for discomfort causes the addiction in the first place, but having been around enough of it you run into ridiculous shit like my roommate complaining about the heat during a power outage 30 minutes after the power went out (Yeah, it got humid and a bit stuffy, but it was during the night, below 80 degrees outside, and dark. It didn't get hot.) or a buddy's pillhead girlfriend requiring controlled substances to treat a headache.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
11mo ago
One of the oddities of my company (which is a subcontractor for distributors, of which one of the two that comprise most of my route is presently breaking up such that we're essentially losing the contract to a competitor) is that they emphasize Cicerone certifications, which from my uninformed opinion seem aimed more at the serving/bartending end than the back end/dispensing side of it. I don't think that I want to pursue the beer industry long term, but I'll check out competing distributors/line contractors for what opportunities they have.
My mechanical background is primarily automotive (mostly picked up from fixing my own cars or other delivery drivers' cars), so my diagnostic approach sort of follows (how to find a leak in a gas line, for example), but IMO my training was lengthy but spent far too much time on easy stuff and too little time in coolers such that I had to learn how to do things like read kegs on my own, I have little idea how fobs work or why (just when to bypass them), why beer pumps are necessary, etc. If a problem is more complex than I can diagnose in five minutes I'm supposed to tell the account to call the 800 number and send out a service tech (who is booked at least a week in advance and whose fee is likely too high for a probably simple issue).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
11mo ago
I believe that you're absolutely right, and I do credit the bar gig for leveling up my social skills in relatively short order (such that my boss there remarked that it made him feel good to watch me "emerge from my shell"; I did discover that I'm actually an extrovert or at least an ambivert and genuinely enjoy talking to people instead of being afraid of them) to the point that I would heartily recommend that any young man with lousy social skills take a bar gig for six months to a year. If I had gone that route at 21 instead of 31 I suspect that I would be vastly better off, but I didn't know any better at the time. As things are, I did light prep for the interview (The first job interview where I didn't already have the job before I walked in that I've done in 10 years.) and the feedback I got was that it had been "the most impressive he'd ever heard" (So much for the "can't interview well" excuse that I told myself for years).
One of the reasons I don't see much of a future at my present company is that it's more of an overgrown small business with bad financials than a large company with limited opportunities for advancement (My current supervisor did my job for six years before she got promoted, and she really did go above and beyond. I really hope she gets the promotion she just applied for/seems to have been groomed for because she's done far more than just put in her dues. As for me, I don't have six years to waste.). I'm currently looking at manufacturing because my father did the same sort of thing in that field, I have a knack for vocational/technical stuff, and he swears up and down that industry is begging for people like me.
I'm not terribly pessimistic for my long term, but this last few months have been rough and if it makes sense I find the act of typing out my irritation to be therapeutic. Getting feedback from smart and usually successful people (You've always been one of my favorites from the old days, BTW.) is a pleasant and appreciated bonus.
IMO your last paragraph nails the problem, though I'd caution that the 2010-2020 GOP was built on demographic quicksand (because REDMAP was that good, and Democratic gains from '06-08 were reliant on a lot of soon to die blue dog Democrats).
What was the signature accomplishment of the Obama era GOP? Legislatively? I dunno? Shrinking the stimulus a bit? Scuttling the Iran Deal? SCOTUS killed 50 state Medicaid expansion? Meanwhile, the SCOTUS majority that voted liberal against W's signature culture war issue (same-sex marriage, and Trump's justices did the same with Bostock) was 40% Republican appointed. Why lie down and think of the courts when Republican-appointed justices turn liberal almost as quickly as Republicans can appoint them?
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