DillyDaily

Gay lead; when being a stone top just isn't hard enough.

I'd had the same recurring dream since early highschool. It was dream like in that it was a true labyrinth that mademoiselle no structuralism sense, walking around in the dream was ethereal, but the objects within were mundane, the toilets were broken or dirty in ways that could be reality not fantasy, but I always knew it was a dream, and for me it wasn't panicked, it was just helplessly frustrating.

Because it was so recurring (at one point I was having this dream weekly) I told every therapist I ever had and they'll all suggested it was about performance anxiety, since many of the toilets were missing doors, or contamination anxiety, or even just having a full bladder before bed. None of that really resonated.

It was in my 20s, having lunch with and old friend, they'd brought their new partner and we got talking about recurring dreams somehow. We covered the usual, the teeth falling out dream, the highschool exam you never studied for that you're also naked for, etc. I start describing the toilet labyrinth, specifically mentioning that I'm not panicked in the dream, in just confused and frustrated, and this new guy excitedly exclaims "you've got an undiagnosed disability, I guarantee it". He was half right, I was diagnosed, but I didn't have any support systems because I'm broke.

The toilet labyrinth is a very common stress dream, but everyone has a slightly different response to it, and it's motivated by different factors. For some people it's performance anxiety, for some people it's health anxiety. Sometimes it's a fear that your private secrets will cause public shame if they got out. In my case it was my subconscious asking the question "how is everyone else making this look easy? how is everyone else able to do this? The tools I've been given fundamentally don't work! why do people keep staring at me like I'm the idiot for not being able to use a broken toilet? why is no one else talking about how to broken and unusable these toilets are? How is it everyone else managing to do this!?" because I in my real life I was trying to keep up with the able bodied peers while disabled with no support, and I wasn't eligible for support so it was very much "but how do I do anything when I don't have the tools? Stop asking me to jump, and punishing me for not jumping when I have no legs to jump with"

(I have legs, that's just a metaphor)

As if there wouldn't be a black market for menthols if they were the only product to be banned.

This is the thing. Musk and everything his company does in terms of labour and marketing, and just their whole ethos is unethical as fuck, and I can't stand that as a society we are celebrating Tesla.

But self driving cars are not inherently bad or dangerous to persue as a technological advancement.

Self driving cars will kill people, they'll will hit pedestrians and crash into things.

So do cars driven by humans.

Human driven cars kill a lot of people.

Self driving cars need to be safer than human driven cars to even consider letting them on the the road, but we can't truly expect a 0% accident rate on self driving cars in the early days of the technology when we don't expect that of the humanity driven cars.

This is a common misconception with "charity shops" in the UK and "opportunity (op) shops" in Australia.

The assumption is that the charity/opportunity is for people doing it tough to be able to buy cheap clothes and home goods.

But the "charity" is because many shops like this are partner retailers of larger charity organisations, eg: the "profit" from Salvos stores helps indirectly fund Salvation Army Housing and food relief programs.

The opportunity comes from who they hire, if you're disabled or elderly, these shops are more likely to hire you than other retail providers.

But of course, a large number of charity and op shops abuse their staff as much as Amazon and Walmart do. Wage theft and unethical labour practices galore

Yes, there are practices you can adopt in every day life that make you more likely to experience lucid dreaming.

Certain mindfulness exercises to do during the day that essentially give your consciousness muscle memory that you later kicks in when you're dreaming and helps you you pull a bit of control into the dream.

If you have a Circadian rhythm disorder it helps.

As a kid I learned I could "rewind" my nightmares and go back and do things differently the second time. Lots of nightmares where I couldn't run fast enough to save myself I was able to rewind and run faster the second time around.

As a teen I learned that I could just deux ex machina my way out of any dream.

I was having one of my recurring stress dreams about not meeting societal expectations due to lacking resources. I'd had this dream a million times before, I'm desperate to pee and I'm in a labyrinth of broken toilets. Other people are coming and I going and seemingly peeing just fine and not getting lost in the labyrinth at all. but I can't figure out how they're using these broken toilets. Usually in the dream I just wander around anxiously looking to pee until I wake up (and notably, I don't actually need to pee). But this time I was lucid enough to decide, fucking this, the ceiling had been made of glass the whole time, and a dragon burst through to pick me up on the her back and burn the whole Loo-byrinth down.

So now I do that a lot. I was dreaming I was in a house slowly filling with green water and I may or may not have been a snake, but never fear, I summoned a goat from the thin air and gave it wings and we flew away.

I had a dream where the fat bastard from Austin Powers was roomates with Oscar the grouch and I'd been sold to them as a indentured maid and for some reason they were naked and I was deeply uncomfortable with the arrangement, that's when the lucidity kicked in, so I froze time and just walked away from the weird dream, deciding once I turned onto the main road I'd wake up because this was too bizarre to even come up with something better (I haven't even seen Austin Powers)

Wow, that kind of blows my mind to think about, cleaning is often the longest part of preparing and eating food for me. I hate doing it and I will choose what I'm cooking and how to cook it based on the dishes in prepared food to wash up.

My partner once asked why the carrots I cook are always chipped in a rustic style ....because I'm not dirtying a chipping board for a carrot, I fruit ninja that shit.

But I've come to find the cleaning up therapeutic, it makes me feel like the process is over, it's a sense of completion and a job well done.

That said, it's only therapeutics when it's my dishes, and I've got a clean kitchen. If I'm working around, or expected to deal with someone else's dishes, I'm having a protein shake for dinner, because I will lose my temper at inanimate object trying to cook in someone else's mess or having to do 2-3 loads of dishes so I can eat 1 meal.

Regional Australia. I know they're common in new builds, but not the kind of landlord special flips I've lived in obviously 😂.

Well then it's definitely a deal breaker 😂

(Are dishwashers that common in the states? I've lived in 16 houses and never had one, when friends get them installed it's a celebration, they're dishwasher owning kind of people now, fancy)

Learning that the intensity of your hunger sensation is not related to how much you need to eat to satisfy the hunger, but rather, how soon you need to address the hunger, is what changed the game for me.

Instead of responding to feeling ravenous by getting in the kitchen cooking a big meal and sitting down to eat, 40 minutes after I felt hungry, eating easily 2-3 portions, and justifying it with "well I haven't eaten all day".

Now I have an orange or something the second I start to feel that intense hunger, go distract myself, and then 20 minutes later I can think clearly, without food noise and intense hunger to cause me to pile crap onto my plate. So now I can plan a well portioned meal that fits within my goals.

But I think part of that is that I have poor interoception, I never felt hungry unless I was already ravenous. Learning to identify hunger before it turns into "eat everything in sight" is something I need to do. I'm still not very good at it, but I'm better. (for context with my interoception, I also can't tell when I need to pee, or when I'm tired, or when I'm too hot or cold. I'll just randomly feel shooting pain in my hand, look down and notice my fingers are turning blue, then remember to put a jacket on)

I don't like feeling over-hungry because it gives me migraines and I get really nauseous and end up dry wretching when I know what I need is calories. Hence why in the past if I started to feel hungry I'd overeat to really try and nip that sensation in the bud. I failed at diets in the past because I assumed that you were supposed to be constantly hungry, and for me hungry is painful, so I'd give up on diets pretty quickly.

So I personally need to stay on top of my hunger to stay on track with my calorie intake.

I always think about it this way; I was a fat baby, fat toddler, fat kid, fat teen, and fat young adult, I spent 25 years learning how to be an obese fuck. I was a master at it.

Why should I expect myself to be even halfway competent at being a healthy person after just 1-2 years of practicing those skills.

The goal isn't to be healthy tomorrow, it's to take steps every day to learn to be a person who has naturally healthy habits, and grow into being that person for the rest of my life. If that takes 10 years to be able to say "this is who I am now, not a fat fuck" then it takes 10 years, and that's still a faster learning curve than the 25 years I spent obese.

Though I will shout out "the paper towel effect", the first 25-30kg I didn't really see a difference, nor did anyone around me, but every other kilo since then has been a visible change to my appearance and that's very motivating, especially as it gets harder to induce a calorie deficit because I'm getting closer to my goal and maintenance weight range, plateaus are more common. But at the same time it's exciting to be slowly shifting gears into maintenance.

One of the most motivating things for me is going to the gym and grabbing weights equal to the weight I've lost, picking it up and just thinking "fuck, I used to carry this weight around with me 24/7"

My strength training is falling behind my weight loss, I can't even bench the amount of weight I've lost, I can RDL it but that's because I've still got the glutes of a fatty.

There's actually a diverse opinion even within the indigenous community, Indian can be a uniting identifier, but it can also be representative of everything wrong with colonism.

While I'm not American, my understanding from my grandfather who was warded to a government school in Canada (though it's never been clear if he is first nations, he was documented as such but his cultural experience once he joined the army and moved countries to has been white, and I am white, so I can not truly speak to any of this), whether an individual or a tribal group are more comfortable with the label Indian or Native American, or indigenous, or first nations, tends to depend on the relationship between the person/group and reservations and government programs that historically used the terminology of Indian.

My grandfather for example would use First Nation's/Indigenous (though he used to say that he was "treated like first nations" rather than he "is" first nations, because even he had no idea if he actually was or not), he couldn't bring himself to say "Indian" because that's what he was labelled as while subjected to the abuse of the educational system at the time, it's a traumatic term for him. Meanwhile some of the men he knew from that time united under the label "Indian" to claim it back from those that used it to oppress them, it's a point of pride for them.