Another one that wants TV’s to go away. I don’t watch TV at home, so I certainly don’t want it blaring in a restaurant, a Dr. office, or any other public place. Same for music. Like the poster above, my hearing is going and having background music makes having conversations much more difficult.
I have a list of local restaurants that 1) have carpeted floors, 2) don’t have TV’s, and 3) don’t play loud musc. Those are the only places we go to. The list is very short.
Normalize not “bringing your whole self to work.” Work is about knocking it out so we can leave to our homes and families. I want to finish my work and go home to life, not hang out at work and talk about life. I’m not sharing any detail about myself, and I don’t care to know anything about you. When I take time off, don’t ask me about the details.
Every time I see this thread, I think of my forlorn love life
Thing is, for extroverted people who have an active dating life, this is what they do.
So it’s normal, in a sense. Just not among the antisocial set.
I’d like to normaliz male physical contact and cuddling. My father had a horrible case of toxic masculinity. I try not to. Men should be allowed to touch other men without being called sissies or gay*.
I’d like to normalize men displaying paternal instinct by playing with kids. As white cis het male, I usually do great on privilege. But, if I show interest in a kid people assume that either I’m a child molester or i’m just being nice to a kid to score with a single mom. I love children- in the same way Mr Rogers or Jim Henson did. I love telling them stories. I love making funny faces at them. I love doing science demonstrations for them. I want to be allowed to demonstrate that love.
I have a theory that since humans thrive on physical contact, both males and females engage in a lot of touching of each other. But, due to social mores, intra-male touching is done in the form of more violent behavior, like hitting (although it is done lightly enough to not be injurious).
You can see this in the male “bro hug”, where you usually combine an embrace with slapping the other person on the back. Or a guy will put another in a headlock when he’s playing around. Or lightly punch the other person (perhaps in the shoulder, although my dad once said that when he was in his 20s his buddies liked to randomly hit each other in the stomach - it horrified his mom; sometimes it’s directed at the genitals).
I meant in the context of going out in public. If you’re walking down the street and somebody is walking towards you, would you be more shocked if they were naked, or if they were exposing their private parts? I can’t think of anything that would distract from either situation offhand.
I’d like to see this normalized at wedding receptions.
What I meant was, if they’re fully naked, there’s a decent chance that the reaction will be, “Oh my god, that fat guy is naked!”, with the focus on him being fat.
With just his junk out, though, it will be, “Oh my god, that fat guy is flashing his junk at me!”
The latter would feel more sexual to most people, I think.
The word “y’all”. I admit this is a pet bugaboo, but seeing “y’all” used as a singular pronoun, misspelled as "ya’ll", or used to inject a “Southern flavor” into writing or speech (looking at you, Christopher Moore) really gets my BVDs in a bunch. “Y’all” isn’t just a dialect word for “you”; it’s a perfectly grammatical contraction of “you all”, and it’s arisen to fill the English language’s need for an unambiguously plural second-person pronoun. I suspect that either it or “you guys” will eventually fill that role in Standard English. In the mean time, I wish “y’all” would be seen as no more exotic or quaint than “they” or “she”.
Dear Og, yes.
I got lucky that my youngest nephew’s first word was ‘f- -k.’ It wasn’t me or my relatives saying it to him but rather his viewing of the trash truck pulling up to the dumpster in front of their lot: 'f–k for ‘truck.’
Well one would hope so, with an abusive mother like that.
To be fair, though I know nothing about kayaker’s friend Sharon, the impression I got from his anecdote is that Sharon was just pranking her daughter on the occasion of her 18th birthday, and had no intention of literally permanently expelling her from the house without warning just because she was 18.
The fact that the daughter apparently continued to live in the family home for the next year or so seems to support that interpretation, but of course I could be wrong.
Oh, good one. My husband loves kids. He loves making faces at them and making them laugh. And other totally appropriate parenting things. But when he smiles at a random child in public you’d think he attacked them. Once, at an airport, he smiled at a child in its mother’s lap. He didn’t beckon or anything, just a smile. She freaked out. What on earth did she think he was going to do to her child, in a public airport, while the child was touching her?
By getting a job and being good at it? I dropped out after one term plus a work term (co-op, wonderful idea–just university wasn’t for me).
After kicking around the house for a few weeks, my parents said “You need to get a job”. My dad suggested I try at the university where he taught – not a hook, just that he knew they did the same kinds of computing I’d done on work term. So I did, signed my first contract on my 19th birthday. 45 years later, I’m still in computing.
I’m still in touch via email with the guy who hired me, and when I wished him a happy birthday this year, I also asked why he’d hired me. He said “Easy: I saw an enthusiastic techie”.
Did you notice when this happened? I’d be really surprised if you were still working at those jobs after graduating with a business degree in 1970 something - degrees were much less common then and therefore fewer jobs required them. In 1988, I got my first job that required a bachelor’s degree. People who were hired 10 years before me only needed to be high school graduates.
A thousand times yes to the bolded part!
In Pittsburgh, it’s “you’ns”.
My hometown (Morgantown, WV, 75 miles south of Pittsburgh) has been called the geographic boundary between “y’all” and “you’ns”.
Ah yes, my mother was from Johnstown and that’s what the people on her side of the family said.
This makes me wonder. Is there any society, primitive or not, in which public nudity is normal? I always see these photos where the genitals are covered but I don’t know if that isn’t just so “we” won’t be horrified. On the other hand, women’s breasts are exposed, so it can’t just be that.
Not just the TVs in airports, but all of the noise pollution, including greetings from the mayor, reminders not to have guns in carry-on luggage, gate change announcements, etc.