I'll ask my priest.

It was the 70s. The average Vogue reader was assumed to be smoking a pack of Virginia Slims a day.

'You've come a long way, baby!'

Can we join forces and spam X with a flood of Informative deep fakes of select individuals?

A friend was complaining that he was always losing his air pods. I told him about my awesome idea to sell a little cord that would connect them so they were easier to keep track of.

He was like, 'Dude! That's a great idea... You've got to start selling those before someone beats you to it-'

Then it dawned on him and he called me an asshat.

Somehow, I grew up in the one neighborhood in the city that hasn't had a spike in value in the last couple of decades. My mom refuses to move out to a retirement community (at this point she would need assisted living). She likes to talk about improving the property and what color she should paint the upstairs. Watches flipper shows all day.

I don't have the heart to tell her that I have no interest in inheriting the property and that it will be a huge burden to liquidate all of the 'antiques' she has gathered over the last 80 years that now stink of cat piss and many colors of mold.

She's always been there for me in my darkest hours, though, and so has that shit mid century ranch.

I'll still let her win at Wheel of Fortune, as long as she can remember my name.

Hooray. I've been looking to add a few more points of maintenance and failure to my bike.

A lot of people don't know this, but you can put your weed in there.

I'm on the spectrum and digging a hole, diggy diggy hole. Diggy diggy hole!

The movie 'Waiting' has a character whose entire arc is them trying to get over urinal anxiety while working one crazy shift at an Applebee's clone.

Early Ryan Reynolds. Some of the humor hasn't aged well, but it shines a light on the service industry for those that haven't worked in a kitchen/bar/restaurant.

Blacksmithing/bladesmithing.

I spent must of my youth fascinated by knives, still am, and this got me into classical metal working. By the time I was 18 I had built a pretty decent working forge in my mom's backyard.

Shortly after 9/11 I took a week long class in bladesmithing in Arkansas. Outside of Blade Forums and the occasional knife show, I'd never really interacted with other knife people. Not a whole lot going on in my large northern city.

The way those bastards talked openly about anyone that wasn't white or Christian turned my stomach. I pretty much kept to myself, it hung out with the one chill hippy from Oregon, or the eternally gob-struck British blacksmiths apprentice (You sell GUNS in a GROCERY STORE?!)

I learned a lot on that trip. Nowadays I don't bring up my knife hobby because I sure as shit don't want to be mistaken for one of those ignorant cretins.

The current administration awards you a place in office.

It's DEI just Equal Opportunity with a fresh coat of paint so racists/misogynists don't sound like boomers from the 90s when they complain about it?

Not all of us live in the Sout. Many youts live in duh Nort, too.

I had a roommate that asked me for ideas for a tattoo and I told him to just get 'Chinese Symbols' written in all caps on him.

The amazing bastard did it.

I wouldn't be surprised if someone trips and, in the act of trying to break their fall, yanks off Trumps human suit, revealing that he is actually a giant chicken.

When I went to my first Riot Fest I looked around and was like, "Damn, did they shut down the punk rock retirement home?"

Then I realized I had just turned 31 and couldn't trust myself any more.

Whenever I see one of these polls being published I imagine how I would have answered them when I was that age, and I would have lied about every negative seeming question.

What if the poll wasn't really anonymous and this data was going to be passed on to future employers or schools?

They'll find some way to draw up a beneficial neighborhood map that excludes black and brown neighborhoods.

I went for a whole month drying my hands with only independent research and the results were similar to using paper towels.

I miss the clutches of people that would congregate in smoking areas on breaks at work, kinda forced to socialize but all walks of life would be tied together by their shared vice.

Now the smoking area at work has dwindled so I feel like a pariah sucking on my electric nicotine pacifier for a couple minutes, staring at my phone and ignoring the other pariahs that come outside.

Hell, I think I met the larger part of my 2000s friend group striking up conversations outside of bars when you could no longer smoke inside.

Sorry I'm romanticizing am unhealthy dirty habit, but I do think that we, in the US at least, have vilified one more means of social connection.