About 4 hours but not in one go. Everyone is different but I can’t imagine 8 hours straight at anything.

Woah, I’ve not seen any of those! Yes I am old. I liked the animated Aeon Flux a lot, and there was a pretty bad live adaptation, so I thought it was famous.

I think sort of, yes. It’s funny because I will move somewhere, then it gets gentrified and people can’t afford to move there, it’s happened four times in my life. But doesn’t that mean I am an early stage gentrifier, when I move where I can afford to?

And on energy, I feel stuck, need a car, don’t use it often, with two large and two small salaries in the household we are solidly middle class but I don’t want solar panels because then my roof and house become uninsurable, we are all electric no gas.

In short YES anybody living in comfort is likely part of the problem, but I would love for everyone in the world to live in comfort!

Wouldn’t this depend on why the assassin is after me?

Is this obscure? I thought it well known?

You can hedge a loquat - one of my neighbors did this, and it keeps the fruit where you can reach it too.

The dwarf lime tree is the most productive in my yard. The people recommending loquat are not kidding, those are so easy. I want a Jaboticaba this year too.

I’m in zone 10, humid subtropical. Apples do not work here, most peaches don’t, but mango, papaya, bananas, carambola, loquat, longan, a lot of fruit trees are happy here.

There is usually an alligator or two (or three, or…) in the pond by my work. They definitely get big enough to kill a villain before anyone bothers calling to have them relocated.

Yeah one can’t hang clothes outside to dry here, since it’s not dry outside, and line dried laundry is stiff and wrinkled, dryer laundry is soft and smooth. But I still pull half my clothes out and hang them inside to dry because oof dryers sure do wear them out faster.

This makes sense, if they modeled steamrolling people instead of gentle conversation I can understand you don’t have practice or guidance on conversation, and also it’s really normal to feel like you need to have alone space if your family didn’t give you enough of it.

But - unplanned and unwanted are two different things. Without that element of luck, randomness, our lives would be so dull. It’s nice when spontaneous conversation happens. It doesn’t have to go anywhere, doesn’t have to mean anything. I would say if you want to practice the non-confrontational small talk literally just look up from your phone when you are out and about and say hi to people, let them greet you too, see if you feel more comfortable over time.

I will note this is a sort of regional thing - Florida is sort of like ‘The South’ and kind of not, but in terms of people just striking up random conversations, we are like the South. It’s very much normal here. NYC is different people are in a hurry and brusque.

"Woah, those apples look so good! Which ones are they? "

“I can never tell if a watermelon is ripe, can you?”

When I am buying something, often someone will say “have you tried that before? What is it like?”

Stuff like that. Small talk. We aren’t machines, we are social animals who interact with each other. I do think people are quick to discount the value of weak social interaction, shallow relationships, and focus on deep friendships and romantic ones, but those weak connections are so valuable too. They are like a glue for a community, connections that don’t demand much from you.

I’m far from extroverted and moderately socially awkward, but still my life is so much better when I look up and say hi to people.

Do you talk to men you don’t know in public? Small talk, or jokes at a bar? In the grocery store? Why wouldn’t you talk to women? I am a woman and have daughters and none of us is offended by this, nor even the hypersensitive one, not even the lesbian. It’s friendly talk.

It’s harassment if you don’t stop when you get a rejection. It’s harassment if you sidle up with some horrifying personal comment about her body, or grab her arm and make her listen. You aren’t going to do any of that. Small talk is not harassment, flirting is not harassment.

You are right in one way - it was bad that guys used to be able to say anything with absolute impunity, and women couldn’t stop them, I was around for the end of that. Those guys didn’t treat women like people, but in a way, neither are you, right? We are just people, talk to us like people.

Training. I sold things at a market on weekends and told my kids it was “remedial sales and social skills training”. I’m still not a social butterfly by any stretch, but fake it till you make it helped me to be more comfortable talking to people.

I like it on corn. Cheese grits with cheddar & nutritional yeast; on popcorn OMG like it better than Parmesan (and I say this as a woman fascinated by cheese) and on corn on the cob.

I do not like it on tofu as sub for scrambled eggs. Nope. Mostly use it for grits and popcorn.

Just had refried beans (just cumin & salt) today in breakfast burritos (eggs, potatoes, beans, onion, cilantro, cheese, salsa - we only eat once or twice a day on weekends and cook better stuff) and yeah pintos are one of my favorites.

Channa masala

Black beans on yellow rice is my kids’ favorite, they love black beans.

Red beans (cooked from dry with whatever veg we have) and long grain white rice with hot sauce like Tabasco.

I really like pintos on brown rice with tahini sauce but nobody else in my household likes it.

Chopped raw sweet onion on all of them.

I’m not THAT old but have worked for long enough to remember smoking offices. Like, people smoking at their desks.

I’ve surely experienced a decline in aggression in my workplaces over my career but think it has more to do with getting better jobs over time. An office is different from a flea market, restaurant, or retail.

Beans and rice are so healthy and cheap, with so many variations. It’s always beans and rice for me.

My kids enjoyed “Evil Bong” and “Evil Bong 2” they are awful but still kind of funny and quite amusing in their way.

Well yeah. Obviously as colonized land there was, and probably still is, absolutely sickening brutality, and not as long ago as it would have happened in Europe. I just mean that France is unapologetic about enculturating kids even now, and standardizing, keeping a more stable culture.

We tend in the Americas, not just the US, to be more ever changing in culture, we adopt foreigners and they change us and we like that (or most of us do) and there are more pockets of different cultures.

I really don’t know, and I live here. I think it’s just baked into the culture. Like there is too much indulgence in tribalism, it’s not smacked down but wink wink nod nodded.

My kids’ friends are a diverse bunch and don’t seem to judge anybody by their coloring so hopefully it’s easing.

I think in France it’s because they enforce French-ness, right? They make laws against wearing religious dress in school, they push for conformity, they teach kids to be French. It’s almost like a religion. We don’t have the same homogenous culture here, not that it’s any sort of excuse for bigotry.