Seeing ads for spice-scented laundry detergent pods for your bedding, that seems like a good way to make premium-level versions of staple goods (I didn’t buy, the silk sheets take special delicates formula)
I wonder which demographics of (cis?) women have the most heterosexual anal sex. If we looked at the broad categories, age has gotta be one of the most-predictive, right? Or would you guess something else? Nationality, surely? In a given nation, would you guess religion or ethnic group? Which ones and why?
It’s very hard for me to tell; I’ve lived here all my life. An influx of people combined with stagnant housing supply has made a fairly large population of homeless drug addicts and court rulings about tent camping mean that it’s pretty common for me to walk by the charred remains of tents that were burnt down by people starting open fires inside to stay warm.
The city also didn’t used to be covered in mounds of garbage, I’m salty about that.
That said, talking to people who have moved here from other cities it is apparently significantly worse in a lot of places in the US, so you may see real improvement.
It’s still not a very dangerous city by US standards.
Also if there’s a protest downtown you just route around it, but for the last couple of years people have been too cynical and exhausted. I’d expect some more if someone like Trump or Desantis win the presidency, but it will mostly be confined to a few blocks downtown. If you aren’t working in a government building or a business in what is really a very small area of downtown it’s pretty much fine.
Reed’s still good (that’s not a uni though – it doesn’t do graduate education, though it sends the highest share of undergrads in the country there), OHSU is still good, I’d wave off PSU
Basically as far as I can tell all the problems in Portland are related to government apathy about staffing.
Pretty much every government agency I get any insight into here is deeply understaffed for the workload, and also deeply committed to not doing anything to attract staff.
Culture war stuff or ideology seems largely unrelated.
“Pretty much every government agency I get any insight into here is deeply understaffed for the workload, and also deeply committed to not doing anything to attract staff.“
Sounds like ideology to me.
Well, sure, but how would you call that ideology? Republican small government ideology? I mean, I guess our city government is pretty right wing.
We’re hoping that once the structural changes go through the bureaucracy will unclog itself a little.
Well, I do think that until the 2020 unpleasantness, the downtown establishment was like “engaged community-oriented young people with leftward-trending opinions? all to the good, they’ll be great allies in developing this liberal city, perhaps as pertains to service provision and incorporating marginalized eastside communities into our (fundamentally neoliberal westside property owner-run) civic order!” and they’re a bit more hesitant to bring new employees or allies on board without proper vetting now.
Traditionally, there was no such thing as a man past marriageable age with no prospects, is the thing. You got “lifelong bachelor” sometimes but it didn’t really hit the same.
In that, like, men didn’t get “past marriageable age” but there were men that everyone decided, yep, he’s never gonna marry, huh. (Some of them were probably gay. Some of them were not.)
But they were just “confirmed old bachelors” or “lifelong bachelors” or something. It was the prolonging of the bachelor state, rather than a transition into a new state with a new word.
But also “bachelorette” seems to only date to around 1900, which is what I’d expect. Prior to that, men were bachelors, and women were maids and then spinsters.
“Perpetual Bachelor” was also a polite euphemism for “Homosexual” back in the day.
“Playboy” captured the sense of a man who didn’t marry because he had too many prospects to explore…
My little sister’s new boyfriend got a tattoo for her about a month ago and he wanted matching tattoos so he decided to get uh. The tattoo on her ankle of her ex boyfriend’s name that she hasn’t gotten covered up yet
She broke up with him but I also just got the same tattoo
I suppose another take on Marianne Williamson and the neomystic turn generally is it’s a turn inward. It takes all the energy floating about that had been aimed at society and structure and turns it to self and sensibility. And that’s a thing that happens, and you’d kind of expect it to happen around now, and diverted into culture the energy can even get pretty golden-agey as the dialectic grinds towards synthesis.
That’s the social unrest of the 60s diverting into the “Me Decade” 70s and “Morning in America” 80s. That’s the revolutionary period of the 1910s being suppressed in the First Red Scare and yielding to the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, the Harlem Renaissance.
That’s second-wave feminism falling to an ‘80s pincer move between cultural conservatives and S&M postmodernists – falling as a sociopolitical project. And then its themes got turned inward and coopted and reemerged in the 90s as Wicca, as Lilith Fair, as lesbian chic, as riot grrl, as Xena and Scully and Buffy, as the music I think of as VH1core chick-rock – Shawn Colvin, Natalie Merchant, Meredith Brooks, Paula Cole. As a sensibility, a subculture, a product, an aesthetic (that could be digested into more products, into Target collections and remodeling TV about shiplap and healthy relationships)
Starting to suspect the best historical analogue for Joe Biden might be Dwight Eisenhower, as a moderate establishmentarian president that got in after a sharp realignment by the other party, served to provide steady leadership and rehabilitate his own party going forward, checking further radicalism, but disappointed his party’s ultras by not rolling things back to status quo ante or supporting harder-edged pushback like McCarthy
Okay, whatever had been going on I realized it was a whole region irritated – the pectoral muscles, back muscles near the shoulderblade, the flanks over the ribs below the armpit – but lying with my arm stretched out one way and propped with a pillow was fine, hopefully taking the pain point away for a bit is letting inflammation resolve
