Both excellent, but I have to put The Body at the top. I think that’s where I realized how excellent some of the actors in this show were, SMG in particular. Anya’s monologue has stayed with me in a way nothing else from tv or movies ever has. Would I rather enjoy a OMWF singalong? Yes, any day. But The Body felt like a one of a kind thing.

Yeah in most North American dialects it’s produced with a tap/flap, not a glottal stop. Unfortunate, because it would be very fun if it were true for us.

When I loved this song as a teenager I did understand that it was about the girlfriend’s suicide, but I missed the abortion piece. I assumed the “baby’s breath” referenced wedding flowers and “shoe full of rice” was like the rice you throw on newlyweds.

Turns out the only true part of the story is the abortion, which is a rough topic but not inherently tragic. TBH these days a song about abortion could be considered wishful thinking. (Or even celebratory? Cue the Sextina Aquafina abortion song from Bojack.) The suicide is poetic license, but does make for a beautiful narrative of guilt and naïveté.

SleepPhones are great! They are super comfortable and secure (I toss and turn a lot, anything in-ear never had a prayer). I wear mine working out too.

Under-appreciated advantage over cheaper, similar competition: super easy to clean. The mechanism slides in and out of the band, which is machine washable. You’re not just building up sweat and oil might after night.

One tricky thing here is that existing literature is really examining the potential effects of trigger warnings in and of themselves, devoid of context or non-immediate decision making. Does seeing a literal trigger warning make someone feel less anxious? Almost certainly not, why on earth would it?

In studies that find no or slight negative effect, the outcomes are immediate measures. How do you feel right now? If it assesses decision making, it’s whether you do or do not immediately consume the content.

But for trauma survivors the potential to be triggered is always in flux, always dependent on everything else going on in your life, often set off by things that seem unrelated or irrational. Trigger warnings give someone a choice in that exact moment for what to do based on what they believe they can* manage. Yes, it may promote avoidance, but avoidance can increase feelings of agency that allow for reduced avoidance behavior in the future.

As an example from the great college campus syllabus trigger warning kerfuffle: I assign chapters from Durkheim’s Suicide in some seminars, as well as complementary readings with less obvious titles. My students get a warning about this ahead of time, but they don’t get to just skip that part of the class. Some things students have done: scheduled extra therapy sessions during those weeks, read in small groups in the library instead of isolated in dorm rooms, missed a class meeting and made up for it with office hours and a short additional assignment (so they didn’t out themselves to their peers with a panic attack in class). It’s about agency and self-assessment.

A screen with a suicide hotline number isn’t going to magically make someone ok with seeing suicide represented, but it offers an action the person can take to regain agency.

*Or just want to manage. Sometimes you’re just living your life and not super in the mood for exposure therapy, and if you can get your brain somewhere else for a while that’s a very good thing.

I use this example to introduce formal and functional approaches to topics in the social sciences. Any argument you try to make within the debate ends up including a variant of “…because sandwiches [abstraction about what formally defines a sandwich]”, which itself presumes that the “right” way to carve up the world is in categories of form. You could also conceive of sandwiches functionally, where something isn’t a sandwich if we (some cultural or linguistic group) just don’t think of them that way.

From a functional view, the very fact the debate exists at all means hot dogs aren’t sandwiches, cereal isn’t soup, pop tarts aren’t ravioli, etc.

Then I make them think about it in contexts like language, Durkheim, and policy making and watch their little minds explode.

I absolutely consider Phantom Tollbooth a masterpiece. There’s nothing else like it, and it has extraordinary persistence.

Seconding this plea to ignore anyone telling you to force or withhold food. The whole “they’ll eat it when they’re hungry enough” may apply to many picky eaters, but if someone (kid or adult) eats an extremely limited or unusual diet like you’re describing in the comments, there is a good chance it may be ARFID. It’s an eating/feeding disorder that often goes along with autism or sensory processing disorders, but can be separate. Critically, the “tried and true” parenting strategies for breaking picky eaters will exacerbate the problem. Of course the answer also isn’t “let them eat McDonald’s all day and stop worrying,” but there are a lot of strategies for supporting someone (especially kids) to expand their list of safe foods in a low-risk high-reward way.

Like the commenter above me said, everyone who has/had ”issues with food” is going to have an entirely different list of what they can and can’t eat and a different set of strategies that worked or backfired for them. The only general advice I have that I think applies across the board is: lower the pressure. If someone only eats 2 or 5 or 10 things, every interaction with food is already very high stakes and takes up a lot of brain space. You’re probably not going to be able to make specific foods less scary, but you can make the environment safer. Never make an unsafe food the only option, don’t let them see how worried you are, don’t (like my mom did) tell them “scientists found that if you eat more than one hot dog a month you get cancer” or “if you don’t eat vegetables you’ll die before you turn 20.” And maybe counterintuitively, don’t act overly surprised or excited when they are curious about a new food, aren’t afraid of something, like a food now that they insisted they didn’t like, etc. Just go with it as a win for you both. Let them see that what happens when they can eat more food is just…they can eat more food. No drama. (Exception if they are already excited and you are following their lead.)

Resources like NEDA (in the like above) can point you toward some places to start and connect you with other parents and professionals who can offer more contextualized and specific advice. You might also look at the r/ARFID subreddit. It’s mostly adults supporting each other but there’s a lot of wisdom for concerned caregivers and loved ones as well.

I spent longer than I want to admit trying to make a pun with AI as “the elephant in the room” to talk to about to my students about which ways of using LLMs are unacceptable/acceptable/encouraged on the first day of class. I couldn’t do any better than AI-lephant. I even asked chat GPT for help. Very disappointing.

One of the biggest cliche revisionist histories I know of is “Jack of all trades, master of none; often much better than master of one.” It’s an interesting one because it’s been retconned twice.

You’ll hear people respond to first line by saying “um actually the second line of the poem totally changes the meaning.” Yes, it did change the meaning when it was added in the 21st century, 400-500 years later.

Then you’ll hear people one step closer to accuracy who correct “Jack of all trades” by reminding the speaker that it’s not a compliment because it ends with “master of none.” Except the master of none bit wasn’t used until the 18th century, and the second revision with the couplet may actually closer in meaning to the original!

The original, simple phrase “jack of all trades” was first used in that form in the 16th century, possibly as a reference to Shakespeare, and definitely as a phrase that was intentionally ambiguous about whether it should be interpreted as a compliment or insult.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_of_all_trades?wprov=sfti1#Origins

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Please tell me “pliers” is the term for “tweezers” outside the US.

The way you’re describing it sounds like a step past the standard “super taster” experience. Especially if you already know you’re prone to hypersensation in taste (or tactile), you might look into learning more about ARFID, an avoidant-restrictive type eating/feeding disorder. Many kids who don’t grow out of being picky eaters (or even get worse) aren’t as much “picky” as they are literally unable to swallow or keep down most food. There’s been more education about it (especially in adults) recently, leading to a lot of adults having a “holy shit I’m not the only person in the world like this?!” moment. There’s a decent community on Reddit if you’re curious about others’ experiences (though being Reddit there’s also some wildly uncalled for aggressive armchair diagnoses, groupthink, and misinformation, soooo grain of salt).

Mystery solved.

I’m imagining you sending off your dirty laundry to relatives for their birthdays, which is probably not what you mean. Does hamper mean something different for you?