I heave recently embarked on a new relationship with a fantastic man. It’s not without complications and some psychological challenges (both widowed; me 3 1/2 years, him 11 months).
I’ve been very careful to let him take the lead since he’s much closer to his loss than I am, and I have watched very carefully to make sure he’s genuinely through his grieving enough to consider dating. Every indication is he is.
So we have really, really fallen for each other. And now that we are both in a space to get intimate, we are encountering issues. He is experiencing ED. He has no issues when we are not together getting an erection and completing the job, but when with me he fades at the first rumblings.
I have made an effort to talk to him about it, asking what he thinks is causing him to be anxious and I’ve given him lots of space to get comfortable talking about it. He says it’s amazing he can because he’s never had someone who was willing to be open about their needs and fears sexually (we are both nearing 60, so it kinda behooves us to admit our parts don’t work quite like they did when they were factory-fresh).
He has said that our relationship has become quite significant and he wants the first time to be incredible. I have assured him 1) the first time is going to probably be awkward and hilariously fun because it’s the first time for us AND the first time either of us has had sex in years and 2) it WILL be incredible because it is with him and we really care about each other (and it’s not just about f*^%ing).
Now, here’s my questions: What techniques can I use to keep him in the moment and out of his head when we are initiating intimacy?
And
He has decided to secure some medicinal assistance to get “over the hump” of our first time. How do Cialis and Viagra work when it comes to anxiety-induced ED. I would hate to have him take it only to fail. I’m afraid it would cause real psychological damage.
Thanks.

Hey so I’m an incoming freshmen so if my question is dumb let me know. I’m looking at the gen ed requirements while filling out my pre advisory worksheet. For a lot of the categories they are broken up into sub categories. For like the cultural studies it specifically says you must do one of each sub category. However for Natural science and tech, Social and Behavioral Sciences, and Humanities and Arts if doesn’t specifically say the sub categories are required. So could I get away with say two natural science classes in the same category? I ask cuz I have a bunch of AP credits I’d like to use if possible

Still treating them like family? And lets them near little girls when that person had drugged and SA’ed me as a teen for 7 years?
Right when I was about to file a civil lawsuit against my stepfather, my mother suddenly turned cold and called me evil. Then abruptly cut off all contact with me. And I fell apart. It took so much therapy and lost jobs to finally feel ok. 3 years later, I had to reach out to my mother to settle student loans details. To my surprise, she all of a sudden is acting kind, sad that she has been lonely, and I am here now suddenly comforting her.
Then yesterday I found out that turd stain was hanging around my little sister (who wants to be with her father), that he has a gf who is a lawyer with a son (luckily not a daughter), and I have this rage bubbling inside me to out him to everyone. Bc he deserves to be on neighborhood watch listed as a child sexual predator. But he is not and he is free to live his life and has a job at local very popular amusement park (think animation) as a security guard. Where he is around little girls and young teens. It’s infuriating and I can’t stop fantasizing about outing him!
How do you deal with this? I am going to file a lawsuit against him in the next 5 yrs as I have about a decade to get lawful justice (researched statute of limitations). However, only when I have enough resources to do so.
A (very long) backstory, mother abandoned me at 5 yrs old, I had a father who was a drug addict and wildly physically abusive. She shifted the blame of abandonment due to my father using me as a bargaining chip “you leave me and you leave her, or you stay with me, keep getting DV’ed and you can stay with your daughter”. She chose to leave.
Then years later we reconnected, she took me into her home where my little sis was just born and her bf of 5 yrs lived, and he immediately became a creep. I was 13 yo then. Slowly, he groomed me into believing he was looking out for me, turning me against my mother, told me all the bad things she said behind my back (which was honestly true, my mother was donwright neglectful and hated my face bc she said it looked like my dad.)
Then… after a year of pretending to be a friend to a 13 yo, he crossed physical boundaries and I tried to run for help.
Sadly, my mother didn’t care to listen even when I was sobbing for her to listen. And he rushed up, took me by the arm and told me to come with him in the car. And begun driving me to school. There, he cried, emotionally manipulated me, and said if I told anyone, my little sister would be without a father like me, my mother would be homeless bc of me. And that it would be all my fault.
And a few days later, he’d cross the line again. But this time, I cried in the bathroom scrubbing myself over and over again bc I felt so dirty, disgusted for what he had done to me. He had me drink shots of liquor, gave me illicit drugs, and would go to town when I’d black out. Other times, I would be asleep and he’d come in pants down, and just made me do it.
7 years of this and I am still getting flashbacks of times I had blacked out. Now hearing he is living free, unseen by the law as a criminal and pedo, with access to young girls, I am furious.
How would do you handle your own fantasies of outing the abuser? How do you handle connecting with family members who pretend nothing happened?
His mother (the pedo’s) literally told me I was TEMPTATION at 13 yo and that’s why he couldn’t resist SA’ing me. I was so shocked to hear that. Even looking at my lil sis who is now 17yo, she looks so young. How could a mid-30 yo man find a 13yo as temptation? How could his mother say that? Ugh!!

PART 3

Max woke in the night to a plinking sound. He had fallen asleep crying over Scat, treat bag and collar on the table in full view. His eyes were blurry and sore, his nose was runny and sore and the nature channel was his distraction. Ruth was letting off a lovely glow and it warmed him to think of Scat so lovingly curled around her, day in and day out. He let out an almost-sob. He didn’t want to give her back. Didn’t want to wake up.
Eventually Max pried one eye open and surveyed the room. TV still on, duvet still over him, the floor wasn’t wet and the ceiling wasn’t leaking, so where was the…
Plink.
Ruth.
Max sighed and rolled over, the duvet making a break for the floor before being dejectedly scooped up again and deposited back across his lap. The small cloud of Scat’s fur wafted off the floorboards and turned Max’s heart. He contemplated going back to the escape of sleep, but finally sat and rubbed his eyes, held his aching head in his hands for a moment and, dropping his hands and lolling his head back, Ruth came into focus. The central glass disc that she had made like a rosette for herself had grown, bloated out. It looked a bit like a tortoise shell, glittery and iridescent and very Ruth, except now, it had…
“Diamonds!” Max yelped, miraculously fully awake.
There, underneath the bulbous disc was a tiny pile of painfully perfect diamonds, so exuberant in colour they seemed almost alive. He could see clean through the pile itself each one was so clear, with a miniature rainbow refracted inside. They were scattered across the table and he realised they were dropping from all over the glass tubes, the largest ones plinking from the central disc.
“Holy cow! What the hell, Ruth! This is amazing! I mean, how did you do that?”
Ruth plinked another diamond from the disc, meanwhile the bobbing gyroscopic mass that had accumulated in the disc decided to bob itself towards Max and answer him with a spiral of flashes and disco lights.
“You really are a crazy, crazy little thing, you know that?” he asked, picking up a diamond and examining it against Ruth’s emitted light show. He threw his t-shirt across the table top and spread the diamonds out on it. There must have been fifteen of them, simply perfect and all different shapes to each other, irregular and yet symmetrical.
Max collapsed into the dining chair next to the table.
Why did they happen today? Why now of all days? It had been nearly a week since he was entrusted with Ruth and she seemed pretty stable up till yesterday. She had grown that diamond factory bulge that reminded him of a tortoise, yes, but now it almost looked like an expensive, old-fashioned sweet dispenser that you get in the bowling alley or in the shopping centres in posh areas. The kind they stuck between the raised beds of fake forest-looking plants in the food court, the kind that were there to tempt the kids after their unfulfilling and unappreciated fast-food dine-outs but used all your pocket money for one jaw-breaker.
Max tried to backtrack. What had he done differently? If he could figure it out, maybe he could persuade Ruth to make more diamonds… his friend would never have to know, he could get Scat a little headstone, and if he could figure out how it worked he could reverse it so there wouldn’t even be any evidence. No, his friend would surely know. Max could save a few diamonds and give them to him and say she just started… have to work out the details later. First things first.
“So, Ruth. Why are you giving me these little nuggets of joy, huh? What did I do to warrant this spectacle?” He talked to Ruth, but she didn’t respond. No movement, just the usual swirling around. Max watched the glass disc closely through his puffy eyes but couldn’t see where the diamonds fell from, nor anything that would suggest a factory line of compressed carbon was in progress. She seemed to be slowing down.
Max pressed his brows together, then slowly lifted the fern up onto the table again. This was the only thing different. The bamboo was outside and Scat was…
A wave of horror flooded over Max. He launched himself out of his chair and sprinted to the window and, ripping back the voile, he saw the bamboo had grown six feet over night. He knew it grew fast from watching that documentary about tropical rainforests but this was a stretch too far. Much too far. That damned thing hadn’t grown in years…
“Ruth,” he said turning to her, “what did you do?”

For the next few hours, Max observed Ruth from across the room. The discovery channel was on in the background, as always. Ruth didn’t seem to do much without it these days but for a hunk of glittery glass and brass Max supposed not much was interesting unless it moved or had nothing whatsoever to do with man-made things. Suited him just fine. Who needs politics anyway?
Apparently, Ruth had taken it upon herself to make the fern shrivel up and increase her diamond production, much to Max’s exuberant happiness and overwhelming horror. He shoved the sofa to the far end of the room and started putting all his household plants in the spaces between the table and himself. The kitchen herbs went first.
He had taken one of the diamonds down to the swanky precious stone and metal specialist at the posh end of town (his name was Horace, apparently,) and had it valued. He took extreme pleasure in watching the man’s face freeze in wonder at the rock placed before him. I’ve never seen such a stone, Horace said. Never seen such a clear, colourful, perfect stone in my life, Horace said. It’s phenomenal, Horace said. Where did you get it, Horace asked. I inherited it, Max lied. It’s worth a fortune, Horace said. Thank you, I’ll have it back now, Max said. He made sure to stop by the garden centre on his way home.

The front room was a sea of plants. Max waded through them, deciding that a walkway to the door would be a vital escape route that shouldn’t be compromised, in case Ruth decided she had been on her vegetarian stint for long enough. Max had toyed with the idea of getting a fish tank or some other living creature to put next to her as a safeguard but he promptly remembered Scat and nearly broke down on the shop floor in front of the display tanks. Besides, the plants were working! There was already a multitude of stacks of plastic pots and trays next to the front door ready for recycling, and all the withered remains of whatever the pots had housed was scattered along the borders amongst the dog daisies and tulips. Ruth was putting out a considerable amount of stonage these days. Max bought an old bank safe online. It was currently sat in the hallway because that’s as far in as the two couriers could lift the thing, and there was no way on god’s green earth that Max was going to let them into the front room and risk them getting curious. The safe was only waist-high and wasn’t too ugly, so the hallway it was.
Max carefully spun the dial clockwise, anti-clockwise, clockwise again, on and on, muttering under his breath as he read from the bit of paper he guiltily kept in his pocket alongside his friend’s contact details. He used his whole bodyweight to wrench open the door and deposit the load of diamonds in a mason jar, nestled it in next to its siblings that were already full and stacked up there. He had set up a system of small tubs under the hotspots for diamonds drops and his favourite whiskey glass under the place where the large diamonds fell. He emptied them regularly, always aware that someone might knock on the door, he might need to pee or Scat might need to go outside (no, poor thing, he was there already). His kitchen was full of boxes of new mason jars and his lounge was full of plants, like some weird meth lab. A thrill of fear swept down Max’s back and up through his throat looking at all those jars, heavy with precious stones. He knew the smallest one alone would make him a disgustingly wealthy man. Horace had confirmed it.
Two days later, and there was no more space in the safe. Nowhere else to put those little rocks. Max decided to give Ruth a break, let her rest while he decided what to do next. He couldn’t have a house full of safes, his friend would already think it was weird that the one in the hallway appeared out of nowhere. Max put a coffee table over it, covered it with a tablecloth and some old bank statements, throwing on a phone charger for authenticity.
He had taken to talking to Ruth while the documentaries were on, she seemed to like that. He had been taking daily trips to the garden centre and leaving with a fully loaded car, right up until they looked at him suspiciously (he was a renowned leave-it-to-the-bugs kind of gardener; after years of failed attempts at keeping his plants alive and fruitless efforts of the garden centre employees to dispense advice he could keep to), so he started frequenting other nurseries as well.
Today, he was going to figure out how Ruth did it. He had to know. In his mind it was the equivalent of finding out how the Egyptians built the pyramids (because it obviously wasn’t aliens,) and the fact that even his friend didn’t know what this thing could do was something altogether more impressive! He may well have created it, but it was Max who had realised Ruth’s full potential, it was Max who had figured out the process, it was Max who had discovered the balance of life and death. Nobody could take that from him. But to really put the boot in, he wanted to know how.
“Come on, Ruthy, tell me how you do it. Let me see you do it, just once.” Max waited for a response. There was none. Then…
Plink.
He had seen! He knew now! Ha!
“Yes! That’s it! That’s the ticket! I knew it, old gal, this is going to be such an epic day! I can’t wait to see their faces, suck on THAT!”
Max jumped, air-punched and whirled around the front room, ecstatic in his discovery. Never again would they look down on him! Never again would they look at him like he was an idiot because he couldn’t get the printer to print on both sides of the paper, they wouldn’t reject him, the girls would think he was funny, he was going to be filthy rich, he could save the world! He, Max, was all powerful.
Oh yes. That’s what I’m talking about.

It might be confusing sometimes. When must I use -ed or -ing? Whats the differences boring and bored?
someone says on instagram, -ing focuses to reason of emotion but other one focuses to feel of person. is that right? Could u help me?

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/consecrate

So I've 100%'ed a bunch of LEGO games in my life (8, to be exact) and in every single one of them, True Jedi / the game's equivalent of True Jedi was possible to obtain while casually playing through the level in Story Mode. The same thing seemed to be the case when I started 100%ing LEGO Star Wars III. That was until I got to "Destroy Malevolence".
I played through the level the way I always do - getting as many studs as I possibly can, and yet, I only got around halfway to True Jedi. I decided to put a pin in the level and attempt it again after I completed the Story Mode, but even in that attempt, I couldn't even get to 80%.
I looked through many different playthroughs of the level, but no one actually got True Jedi in any of them. Does anyone know if getting it in this level is even possible? (if you don't use Free Play / Red Bricks)

Buonasera, m29 38k di RAL project manager IT per azienda di prodotto (circa 400 milioni fatturato), 5 anni di esperienza dopo aver fatto la magistrale di ing informatica (2 anni consulente ERP e i restanti 3 nell’attuale lavoro). Il mio lavoro consiste nell’essere una specie di raccordo tra i diversi dipartimenti, principalmente supply chain, marketing e retail, per l’inserimento di nuovi tool in azienda o per l’aggiornamento di tool già presenti (wms, crm, sap erp) collaborando con i diversi fornitori. Non sviluppo software, cerco solo di tirare le fila del progetto per cercare di rispettare budget e tempi. È un periodo piuttosto buio per l’azienda (numeri negativi e cambio radicale nella parte manageriale) che ha portato a grossi tagli di budget tagliando alcuni progetti e rendendo i miei ultimi mesi molto statici.
Ho ricevuto un’offerta da una grande società (più di 5 miliardi di fatturato global) per una posizione di consulente per uno specifico settore aziendale, non indico quale perché poche in Italia fanno questo. L’offerta è di 43k più auto aziendale ad uso promiscuo e dovrei seguire diversi clienti in Veneto ed Emilia Romagna, io abito a Bergamo. Questa società sviluppa propri sistemi che andrebbero ad integrarsi con i classici software aziendali dei clienti (erp, wms, procurement). Revisione salario annuale e bonus di permanenza dopo 2 e dopo 3 anni. Il mio grosso timore è di incastrarmi in una posizione un po’ troppo specifica (essendo legata ad un solo settore aziendale) e di concentrarmi sulla conoscenza di tool proprietari dell’azienda, conoscenza non troppo rivendibile in caso di cambio futuro di mansione.
Ne ho parlato con il mio responsabile che mi ha proposto di affiancarmi all’attuale project manager di SAP interno per poi sostituirlo da settembre di quest’anno perché gli scade il contratto (chiaramente se tutto dovesse andare bene e se riuscissi a dimostrare la mia capacità nel farlo). Considerate che la mia attuale azienda deve ancora fare il rollout di SAP in 3 grosse sedi (usa, Spagna e Giappone) e sono previsti tra il 2025 e 2026.
La mia preoccupazione, specialmente in questa fase della mia vita, non è il solo stipendio, ma cercare di intraprendere una strada che possa aprirmi a diverse opzioni in futuro arrivando a ricoprire posizione di responsabilità, rimanendo nella sfera della gestione di progetti.
Avete dei consigli? Specialmente per chi è molto più esperto di me che può dare anche consigli di “vita lavorativa” Grazie

My husband (29M) and I (27F) have been invited to his cousin’s (29M) wedding in the summer in Newport, RI. Although my husband and his cousin were close when they were little kids, they aren’t close now, and haven’t been close for many years. Additionally, my husband and I have only met his fiancé one time.
Coincidentally, the wedding is on the exact same day as my husband’s 30th birthday. Because of this, my husband and I have decided to stay in Newport for two nights instead of one. That way, him and I can celebrate his birthday in Newport (the night before the wedding) at a nice restaurant.
Well, here’s the problem. On the night we are celebrating his birthday (the night before the wedding), there’s a “welcome party.” We respectfully RSVP’ed “not attending.” At first, I didn’t feel bad about RSVP’ing “not attending,” but since then I have been invited to the bridal shower AND my husband has been invited to the bachelor party, both of which we RSVP’ed “not attending” to. Now, we have RSVP’ed “not attending” to three events (aka everything except the wedding).
I feel bad, but at the same time, the wedding is already expensive enough to attend (hotel, gift, black tie, etc.) and we’re not even close with the bride or the groom. Are we assholes in this situation?

Shadow the Hedgehog's a b****-a** motherf***er, he pissed on my f***ing wife. That's right, he took his hedgehog-f***in' quilly d*** out and he pissed on my f***ing wife, and he said his d*** was "This biiiig!!!" and I said "that's disgusting," so I'm making a callout post on my Reddit DOT com: Shadow the Hedgehog, you've got a small d***, It's the size of this walnut except WAY smaller. And guess what? Here's what my dong looks like: that's right baby, all points, no quills, no pillows-- look at that, it looks like two balls and a bong. He f***ed my wife, so guess what, I'm gonna f*** the EARTH. That's right, this is what you get: MY SUPER LASER PISS!! Except I'm not gonna piss on the Earth, I'm gonna go higher; I'm pissing ON THE MOON! How do you like that, Obama? I PISSED ON THE MOON, YOU IDIOT! You have twenty-three hours before the piss drrrrroplllllllets hit the f***ing Earth, now get outta my fucking sight, before I piss on you too!

she said of her former coworkers. “I’m telling every dirty, f—ing thing I know about every one of them. It’s going to be great, because I kept those secrets all those years in the interest of the show.” She said that the only reason she hasn’t spilled the alleged secrets already is because she’s too nice. “I was an idiot who cared about people and I went out of the way to help them,” she said, adding that she bowed out of Roseanne to make it possible for ABC to create The Conners, and she allowed that to preserve the jobs of those who depended on the show. That’s what people don’t know about me, and the thing I regret most about myself. If I can f— those people over the way they f—ed me over. G——it, it will be great,” she said. So is she going to expose John Goodman, Sarah Gilbert, Lauren metcalfe?? It’s been 6 years and this women is still bitter.