How are things on the West Coast?
I hear you’re moving real fine.

I’m sort of glad it is finally dwindling. Having been single for 36 years, it often has felt like a survival instinct, and as though I were starving. Now I can wave goodbye to that lustful frenzy and mourn the loss of the potential it once represented.

When I was a teenager, I got a fever and chills while staying at a friend’s house. The next morning, I had a huge bump on my leg (probably three inches in diameter). When I went to the doctor, they said it was probably a spider bite (they said “a relative of the brown recluse”) and I had surgery to drain the infection…

If they are willing to date me, that’s a pretty bad sign.

Yeah, it’s too bad they never made any sequels.

What “definition” sets 150k per year as rich? That certainly isn't independently wealthy. Federal government workers at the top of the GS make around $150k.

I have nothing constructive to add, other than to compliment you on some very fine writing.

The company wasn’t publicly traded at the time, so there was no way to just repurchase the stock. I also wasn’t immediately notified about the sale.

The bottom line is that they used arbitrage and an underhanded loophole to take back what I earned at a discount. The possibility that there were possible ways to mitigate…

I got burned early on in my career, because the company I worked for paid its match in stock and kept the 401(k) at Vanguard. However, they had a provision that if you were no longer an employee at the company, you had to leave the program if it had below a certain value. What this amounted to was a forced buy-back of…

I’m uncomfortable with it as well, but I use it to illustrate the continuum of sexual fluidity. It’s better to say that one’s sexual orientation identity is informed by culture and socialization; the underlying orientation is probably innate. So I really should have said that many people identify as heterosexual who…

There is a lot of variation in the extent to which sexual desires can be redirected or rewired. As a more extreme example, some people are going to be homosexual or heterosexual no matter how they are socialized. But a lot of men who are heterosexual in this society probably would’ve been homosexual or bisexual if…

My guess is that are a lot of potential implications, some of them including trauma, some including sexual sadism. Another possibility is that, as a child, the person associated sex with pain - he heard his mother moaning, for instance, and thought she sounded like she was in pain. Or the idea of penetration seemed…

From whose perspective? You could imagine the feelings of either person in the video, just as you can imagine when you are acting out the fantasy yourself. It isn’t a genre I’m interested in, but I think most people who enjoy rape-play porn would be horrified if they were shown a video of a real rape. The same way…

There is a difference for the “aggressor” role, because the aggressor knows that the pain and aggression aren’t real.

Who wants to bet that the original label had something that looked like “MO” instead of “MI?”

Can minors in the UK doctor shop?

Fair points. I just looked below, and bunnysisters00 said more or less what I was going to say. While I am sure there are problems with state level mental health services (and these problems are difficult to solve... you don’t want family members to have commitment powers), it seems like Ms. Lanza had a lot of options…

What if the doctor wanted to prescribe ritalin, or some other drug you might feel has dangerous long-term effects?

Adam Lanza’s parents were wealthy; you can’t pin Lanza’s shooting spree on lack of state-funded mental health options. His mother also purchased guns for the home and took her mentally ill son to shooting ranges.

Could you clarify the difference? Wikipedia says “Absolute pitch (AP), widely referred to as perfect pitch, is a rare auditory phenomenon characterized by the ability of a person to identify or re-create a given musical note without the benefit of a reference tone.” It seems like being able to name notes and sing them…