So, I'm in a relationship with a girl for the past 4 years. Currently, I'm residing outside India and have been for almost 2 years. We both were very serious about it from day one. Our parents met last December for the first time, and then again last March. Everyone in the family is extremely happy, as am I, since we are planning to marry at the end of December this year or early next year. I certainly love her from the bottom of my heart and she also loves me a lot. However, during the last few months, there have been issues after issues, and now I'm deeply concerned about our future. She is the only girl I have dated, and it was almost a blessing for me as from day one I imagined her as my better half.
Now, coming to the core issues between us, I have jotted down all the points that bother both of us along with her responses. I have tried to be as neutral as possible and removed our personal biases from it.

Anecdote One

This happened a couple of months back when her parents met my parents for the second time. Everything was looking good, but it seemed she was a bit unhappy. I asked her many times, but she was hesitant from the beginning. Later, she said I didn't appreciate her much and I don't understand her fully. Initially, I was hesitant to accept it, but I realized there is certainly an issue that needed to be addressed as we are not living together for a long time (I usually visit India once a year and stay with her for almost a month). I agreed with her and she was certainly right that I don't appreciate her enough. Regarding knowing her, I said it's a long process; I certainly don't know everything but I will try to do much better once we live together. Apparently, the fight was sorted and we both were very happy.

Anecdote Two

She has mostly male friends in her group from childhood to college and even at work, which is completely normal in this day and age. I certainly don't have a problem with male friends, but there are two folks that I don't like, though she admires them. There was no fight as such until last month as I accepted they were just friends. Somehow, last month both visited her place for 5 days and, as they were new to the city, they stayed together. To be honest, I was a bit unhappy as there was only a single room and she had to sleep in the drawing room on the sofa. But to be fair to them, this was not the issue. I understood that since both hadn't met for 6 months, they wanted to spend some time together and have fun. There was a day when I was a bit unhappy as she was not picking up the call or responding to texts. I then slept due to the late night in my place. Apparently, she was very angry about the incident and told me, "You don't really care about me being happy, you wouldn't have messed up the thing that day."
As she was very angry, I said sorry to her and assured her that it wouldn't happen next time for sure.
A few days later, when things seemed to be normal from our end, deep down I couldn't understand my fault. I believed and felt that she was not acting normal when they were there with her. I said I didn't like the idea of inviting the boys to her place and staying with them and the way they were holding each other (I'm not against hugs, but it didn't feel like just a hug; it felt a bit different, a bit romantic). To which she said, "Nobody has the right to tell me what I want to do in my life, I live life by my own choices."
She has written a long paragraph about the following incident and I'm quoting it verbatim: "Because I was the happiest kid who was having all the fun and where I felt I was perfect the way I was, not because I am, but because they made me feel so. Not for a single second did I lose a smile on my face. The child within me lived to the fullest. My madness was at its peak."
After this, I couldn't respond to anything. Now she is planning to stay at their flat for a week next month.

Anecdote Three

Last week, I was on a business trip and lots of our colleagues visited my office, including many colleagues from India. However, there were a couple of Indian colleagues who were a bit off from their normal behavior. They were throwing garbage in the bus, not following traffic rules, creating a ruckus in the bar after drinking a lot, and didn't arrive at the most important presentation because they planned a city tour. I can understand they are visiting the place for the first time, but I was a bit unhappy about their behavior. I shared the story with her and, strangely enough, she supported them. She said, "You are too serious about life. Don't stop people from enjoying." I disagreed as it was a very important event for our department. She said her male best friend would do the same and that life is for enjoyment. I didn't argue after that point.
I don't know what to say. I'm a bit anxious and nervous. If I say something, as she has said I'm considering my decision to marry you!, but I really wanted to know: Am I wrong to ask her? As things will not matter in the long term, am I being too insecure about my partner? For me, it's hard to share the same room/flat where only three of them will stay.
PS One for things which pisses me off is she is keeping their T Shirt with her. As a memory which I don't understand a bit.

SCREENRANT:
"The most recent edition of Puck's "What I'm Hearing" newsletter contains a deep dive into the state of play at Paramount Pictures amid the ongoing process of selling its parent company. The report contains some fascinating information about the future of Star Trek movies, and reveals the contract negotiations for Simon Kinberg to come aboard and produce the new origin movie. Read the full quote from What I'm Hearing below:

And I’m told Simon Kinberg, the prolific producer of X-Men and other Fox-Marvel movies, is negotiating to join Star Trek as its new steward in film. If his deal closes, Kinberg will technically produce just the prequel being directed by Toby Haynes (Andor) and written by Seth Grahame-Smith.
But since Star Trek 4 has script and schedule issues with that famous (and expensive) cast, the prequel will likely shoot in early 2025 and could very well end up as a reboot. Plus, Paramount sees Kinberg as a franchise shepherd à la Alex Kurtzman for Trek TV projects, even though J.J. Abrams remains as a producer. Whether that new film is a Paramount or Sony release remains a question to be answered by Shari Redstone, of course, but the studio’s other suitor, Skydance, does retain its option to co-finance and produce the Kinberg Trek movie."

Currently, Simon Kinberg is in negotiations only to produce the Star Trek origin movie, written by Seth Grahame-Smith, and directed by Toby Haynes. This makes a lot of sense as Kinberg already has a working relationship with Grahame-Smith from producing the movie adaptation of his novel Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter back in 2012. The most interesting element of Puck's report is the implication that, should the origin movie perform well, Paramount may drop Star Trek 4. If the Star Trek origin movie becomes a defacto reboot for the movie franchise, then it will need some creative stewarding from a producer with a creative vision."
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER:
"Kinberg rose to prominence thanks to his writing and producing work on Fox’s X-Men franchise, over whose course he took creative control and even made his directorial debut with Dark Phoenix. He has has also worked movies ranging from Murder on the Orient Express to The Martian, as well as select Star Wars projects. And he worked with Grahame-Smith before, as co-screenwriter and executive producer on his adaptation of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter."
Links:
https://screenrant.com/star-trek-prequel-movie-simon-kinberg-star-trek-4-timeline/
https://puck.news/newsletters/what-im-hearing/
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/star-trek-movie-franchise-reboot-paramount-1235904930/

I revisited this album and now I have multiple questions relating to these two songs that I would like clarity on if anyone has answers, I'll list quotes from the songs, followed up with my questions related to the lines:
​

Whitney's hurt, the purest soul I know, I found her in the kitchen
Askin' God, "Where did I lose myself? And can it be forgiven?"
Broke me down, she looked me in my eyes, "Is there an addiction?"
I said "No," but this time I lied, I knew that I can't fix it
Pure soul, even in her pain, know she cared for me
Gave me a number, said she recommended some therapy
I asked my momma why she didn't believe me when I told her "No"
I never knew she was violated in Chicago, I'm sympathetic
Told me that she feared it happened to me, for my protection
Though it never happened, she wouldn't agree Now I'm affected, twenty years later trauma has resurfaced
Amplified as I write this song, I shiver 'cause I'm nervous
I was five, questioning myself, 'lone for many years
Nothing's wrong, just results on how them questions made me feel
I made it home, seven years of tour, chasin' manhood
But Whitney's gone, by time you hear this song, she did all she could -'Mother I Sober'

(All relevant lines for most context)
1). This is the most confusing one to me. To my understanding this is the moment Whitney finds out about Kendrick's infidelity/lust addiction. It reads as though this convo occurred when he was 25 years old ("twenty years later, after I was five") so this would be at or around 2012-2013, which fits in with him saying Whitney asked him about this soon after the GKMC tour. Which he mentioned earlier on 'Worldwide Steppers'
"good kid, m.A.A.d city tour, I flourished on them stages, Whitney asked did I have a problem I said, 'I might be racist'"
So this kind of makes it sound like this was a conversation they had over a decade ago? The "I made it home, seven years of tour, Whitney's gone" line makes this more confusing because I would assume the GKMC or Yeezus tour or even the Drake one were the first ones he was a part of back in 2012/2013, unless he is just talking about 7 years prior to the original interpretation where he would just be doing random shows back when he was K.Dot. Unless he's saying this is when the conversation happened, they remained together until sometime recently they split, but this would be unsubstantiated. So personally I think it is clear when Whitney found out about his infidelity sometime 10+ years ago, however it's very unclear when or if Whitney is even really gone and if they don't live together, see each other, or parent their kids together. The meta perspective of her appearing on the album multiple times and being a part of the artwork, and posting a ton of her own self growth stuff on IG as well an Kendrick never really saying anything contrary besides this one line leads me to believe they're still very much together?
​

So I set free my cousin, chaotic for my mother's pain
I hope Hykeem made you proud 'cause you ain't die in vain -'Mother I Sober'

2). Obviously this is referring to Kendrick's cousin who is the parent of Baby Keem (who I always thought was Kendrick's first cousin, and not his first cousin once removed), but who is this cousin? Is this the cousin that was accused of touching Kendrick? I assume this isn't the same cousin from Auntie Diaries due to the similar age? Also do we know how or when they died? I feel like I'm missing something obvious. For some reason a Genius annotation says this is a female "his female cousin who’s the mother of Baby Keem" I'm not sure where this is concluded from.
​

"Mother cried, put they hands on her, it was family ties" -'Mother I Sober'

3). This is saying that someone in the family hit his mother, not that someone in the family was the one that molested his mother?
​

"Mother's brother said he got revenge for my mother’s face, Black and blue, the image of my queen that I can't erase" -'Mother I Sober'

4). Kendrick's Uncle beats up another family member to avenge what happened in the previous line above?
​

"I asked my momma why she didn't believe me when I told her "No"
I never knew she was violated in Chicago, I'm sympathetic" -'Mother I Sober'

5). I assume we have no further context to what happened here, whether or not this incident happened by someone in the family or not, just that it happened previously when she lived in Chicago before moving to Compton?
​

My Auntie is a man now -Auntie Diaries
Where is your uncle at? 'Cause I wanna talk to the man of the house -Family Matters

6). Final question regarding 'Auntie Diaries'. There was a little bit of discourse over Drake's line in 'Family Matters' regarding Kendrick's Aunt/Uncle. From my understanding, yes Kendrick's Auntie is a transman, but just because that's the case doesn't necessarily mean that he wants to be referred to as an Uncle. Is it reasonable to believe that because of the title of the song, the repetition of "My Auntie is a man now", and no other indication in the song, that Kendrick's Auntie retained the Aunt title regardless of transitioning to a man? (Technically making Drake's line incorrect/hurtful?) (Note: also in an interview around 2013 Kendrick referred to him as his Auntie then for what that's worth)

Hi everyone. I'm 25f. I've been wanting braces for a long while now as not only am I self conscious about my smile & face shape, my teeth/bite are a source of discomfort. My upper palete is narrow and I have teeth coming inwards too much that bite down on my tongue, I also have jaw pain and tension headaches which I feel could be due to my crossbite.
The issue is, my teeth and oral health is awful, and I don't have hope for them lasting longer than 20 years before I need dentures. My parents didn't ever enforce dental hygiene or ever take me to the dentist as a child. I started brushing consistently around 13 years old but I think it was too late by then, by 16 I had numerous cavities, and at the current point in time I have a filling on more or less every tooth, one extracted molar, 3 root canals (one of which is my top front tooth! This scares me a lot).
Between 2018-2023 I had an extensive treatment plan with my dentist (which is arguably not resolved as I still haven't got permanent fillings). Despite one tooth being seen to at the end of last year, I already have a new cavity on it. Despite brushing x2 a day with an electric sonic toothbrush, flossing, using a waterpik, using xylitol gum, etc I still managed to get a new cavity in 6 months so clearly something is wrong. I have CFS and POTs so I think my oral health might be tied to that/have some sort of autoimmune origin? I do have dry mouth too which I'm trying to combat with xylimelts at night.
I saw an ortho who quoted me £6000 and said I'd also need to pay extra for my dentist to remove 4 teeth, the 4 teeth they'd remove include some of the only teeth in my mouth without fillings/cavities...
Now I'm wondering, is it worth paying £6k+ for my teeth when I may not even have any in 20 years?
Here's some photos of my teeth: https://ibb.co/album/Zpk8Bm
TLDR: My oral health is horrendous despite my best efforts to look after my teeth. Is it worth paying 6k and losing some of my only healthy teeth for braces, in an effort to hopefully relieve discomfort & pain?

Hi everyone. I'm 25f. I've been wanting braces for a long while now as not only am I self conscious about my smile & face shape, my teeth/bite are a source of discomfort. My upper palete is narrow and I have teeth coming inwards too much that bite down on my tongue, I also have jaw pain and tension headaches which I feel could be due to my crossbite.
The issue is, my teeth and oral health is awful, and I don't have hope for them lasting longer than 20 years before I need dentures. My parents didn't ever enforce dental hygiene or ever take me to the dentist as a child. I started brushing consistently around 13 years old but I think it was too late by then, by 16 I had numerous cavities, and at the current point in time I have a filling on more or less every tooth, one extracted molar, 3 root canals (one of which is my top front tooth! This scares me a lot).
Between 2018-2023 I had an extensive treatment plan with my dentist (which is arguably not resolved as I still haven't got permanent fillings). Despite one tooth being seen to at the end of last year, I already have a new cavity on it. Despite brushing x2 a day with an electric sonic toothbrush, flossing, using a waterpik, using xylitol gum, etc I still managed to get a new cavity in 6 months so clearly something is wrong. I have CFS and POTs so I think my oral health might be tied to that/have some sort of autoimmune origin? I do have dry mouth too which I'm trying to combat with xylimelts at night.
I saw an ortho who quoted me £6000 and said I'd also need to pay extra for my dentist to remove 4 teeth, the 4 teeth they'd remove include some of the only teeth in my mouth without fillings/cavities...
Now I'm wondering, is it worth paying £6k+ for my teeth when I may not even have any in 20 years?
Here's some photos of my teeth: https://ibb.co/album/Zpk8Bm
TLDR: My oral health is horrendous despite my best efforts to look after my teeth. Is it worth paying 6k and losing some of my only healthy teeth for braces, in an effort to hopefully relieve discomfort & pain?

My dad is a pastor, and my mom is a seminarian who ran a Christian youth center. Needless to say I was raised in an extremely religious environment, and was basically indoctrinated into Christianity. I hate to say that but it really is the truth. From as young as I can remember religious "education" was constant. At 38 years old I am still processing the trauma of being taught and earnestly believing that I (like everyone else) am so inherently evil that my sins had a hand in crucifying Christ, and that I deserve (like everyone else) to burn in eternal hellfire save for the miraculous grace of God should I follow the right religious pathway, and that most of humanity will end up in said hellfire.
But the thing is: my parents really are decent people. They're just victims of toxic religion too, they just can't see it. But any time I try to share doubts about Christianity I am hit with well intentioned but thoughtless responses such as "But the Bible says you have to believe!" (This is an exact quote from my mom). I have raised academic points such as textual criticisms of the New Testament, including Bart Ehrman's work, to which the response is "Oh we have some books at the church that will show he's wrong" without even considering that their religious views could be less than the absolute gospel truth. My parents lack critical thinking skills - or at least a willingness to use them - in this area, but they really aren't bad people. And I know that their worry about the fate of my soul comes from a good place.
But the problem is, my kids are 3 and 6 and my parents are now worrying about the fact that we don't go to church, and aren't super religious and it's starting to become a problem. They don't really know that I'm truly deconstructing, they just think I have "doubts" that I need to "get past" and then I can "get my family back into church where they belong." My mom is looking for excuses to try and bring my kids to their church on Sundays, often as an offer of babysitting but it's really about "your kids need to be in church".
I am no atheist, and I definitely believe in a spiritual reality. But I think it's much broader than what I was taught, including that evidence from near-death accounts, mediumship, and deep hypnosis in my view points to a broader spiritual reality.
I obviously don't want to teach my kids something that I don't think is true, nor do I want to indoctrinate them. I certainly don't want them to believe themselves to be inherently evil, or "fallen!" If anything I want them to explore different ideas themselves, and examine the evidence themselves.
My parents are involved in my kids lives and I want that - they really are good grandparents. But now that my oldest is approaching the age where he "should" get baptized soon, according to their church, I worry about how to navigate this. I'm probably just a few years away from hearing things such as "[your oldest son] will go to hell if he dies today without being saved/being baptized/"accepting" Jesus etc." They used to hit me with that all the time as a kid: "If you died today do you know for sure you would go to heaven not hell" and it terrified me, which is honestly why I got baptized as a kid, out of pure terror of going to hell. I would rather not put my kids through that...
Anyone have a similar situation? Any suggestions?

It's harder to come to terms with this than I was expecting.
I (32F) know that I've always given my parents a lot of grace - they both had pretty rough lives growing up, and I genuinely think they did their best raising my brother and I. But their best was still pretty emotionally abusive, and left my brother and I with a lot of emotional scars. I thought things were a bit better, now that we're adults - sometimes I love spending time with my parents. But most of the time, it's still very hard to be around them, especially my mother.
Last year, my mother pushed me over the edge (I don't remember what exactly did it, but it was a "straw that broke the camel's back kind of situation), and I went very low contact with her. And then, while moving into the house I'd just purchased, I had a fire. The house wasn't fully destroyed, but it was unlivable, and the mental/emotional toll was huge. I was really floundering, dealing the contractors, the different insurance agents, and trying to find a temporary place to live (for what ended up being a little over 9 months, rather than the 6 months the contractors initially quoted). I didn't have anyone else to turn to for help, so I turned to my mother.
I'll be the first to admit - my mother was a HUGE help in dealing with the contractors, the insurance, and even with designing some changes that needed to be made to the house (the whole process was terrible - the contractors were shitty, took forever, and didn't communicate, and it seemed like every single thing took more effort than it should have, or there was some kind of mistake that would need to be fixed that made it harder to deal with). But emotionally, she was just as hard to deal with as she had always been. She somehow didn't seem to understand that I wasn't going to immediately bounce back from this incredibly traumatic and emotionally devastating event. And the two times that I pushed back on a demand she had, she would say something like "then I just won't help you anymore, and you can deal with this yourself". So of course I would back down, since I knew I was not in a place to be able to handle any of it myself.
And then, on top of the house, I lost my job. So it's been a pretty rough year or so for me. I had hoped, now that I'm finally living in my house, and the contract company has been finishing up the final few issues, that things would get better with my mother. I wouldn't need to see her as much, I could focus on my house and finding a new job and taking care of myself. But no - she's insisted on coming over every few days to "help" with things. Helping unpacking, helping cleaning, helping with yard work. All of which needed to meet HER exacting standards. She finally said she couldn't come over anymore after yelling about my lack of cleanliness (heaven forbit I, an adult in my early thirties, decide not to make my bed every day and vacuum two to three times a week).
And then, two days later, she called to argue with me some more. And she dropped the line that made me finally believe my mother is a narcissist. After almost 30 minutes of arguing and berating me, she insisted that I needed to try and see things from HER perspective. That I needed to try and understand how hard my trauma and pain of the last year have been for HER to deal with.
There are so many other examples that should probably have made me realize my mother is probably a narcissist sooner. But I'm very different from her. I could never imagine asking someone who had been through a huge trauma, and who had told me how hard things were for them, to imagine how hard listening to them was for me. And it hurts. It hurts so much.
I'm really not sure how to deal with this hurt moving forward. I love my parents, and I still want to see them. But I don't know how to go about being around my mother (and my father, who has always enabled her, and insisted that I forgive and move on, every single time she has hurt me in the past) now that I've finally started to understand what she's like. A friend has sent me a book about adult daughters of narcissistic mothers that I'll be checking out, and I'm hoping it helps me to understand how to deal with my mother in a way that's better and more healthy for me.

For context, I'm a 16-year-old living in "socialist" Vietnam. For the uninitiated, you must think that we're a bunch of commies who're still singing praise about Mr. Ho Chi Minh whilst fighting off Agent Orange in guerilla warfare. If that's the case, then, oh boy, you couldn't be any further from the truth.
Last summer break, my dad offered me a position at a traditional Vietnamese food restaurant in the local AEON Mall branch for a month. He said that it would give me good work experience and color my CV, which I agreed with at the time. And so, like the 'pride of the family' that I was (yes, adults call all of their eldest/most academically adept children this in Vietnam), I decided to take him up on his offer. And, despite everything I've read about 9-5s on Reddit, nothing could've prepared me for actually experiencing it myself.
Firstly, the hours are actually 8:30-17:00, so that's 30 extra minutes compared to the average. Secondly, you're supposed to work 7 days a week. Yep, you heard that right. SEVEN. Their rationale was that since we worked in the service sector, we needed to work even on break days to maximize our output as that's when traffic is at its peak. And the best part? We weren't supposed to get ANY days off even on public holidays, because, guess what, that's when everybody goes out to eat. And, for as much as I hated it, I couldn't deny what they were saying. After all, I myself have been guilty of going to restaurants before on holidays with my family, so I am painfully aware of the fact that somebody still had to work their asses off to give us a good time. In this case, I got to place myself into one of these people's shoes for once.
And that's just the time factor. The people there were... well, let's just say that I had a better time just not interacting with any of them in the first place. Like, I get it, you're very worn down just like I am and I'm a rookie making mistakes and messing stuff up, but you don't have to be such a cunt about it. Even I manage to keep a poker face about me almost every day, and yet I'M supposed to be part of the demographic that was known for their erratic mood swings! I swear, only, like, 3 of the employees there had a shred of sympathy in their entire bodies, which didn't make it any easier for me to contort my face into a grin every time I served a customer. Honestly, it's one of the rare cases where the manager had a more likable and understanding personality than his subordinates, which, uh, isn't saying a whole lot, to be frank.
Not to mention the work itself. Somehow, serving there managed to require a lot of finesse to not topple over the tray stacked to the brim with wine glasses and constant physical labor while being mind-numbingly boring. The health and safety regulations there were practically non-existent, and it really showed when I got a nasty cut on my fingertip while skinning some of the hardest-to-peel fruits I'd ever encountered in my entire life. Normally, I'd expect to get at least a break to recover, but NOOO... they just told me to slap on a bandage and get on with it DESPITE the injury I had. Needless to say, I quickly excused myself and found better luck sweeping the floor instead, but that one experience really set in stone for me just how little people cared about each other when push came to shove.
Now, you must be thinking, "Well, at least you're getting paid for it." Yeah, at 24000 VND per hour, no less. For context, that is equivalent to just under a dollar an hour, which goes to show just how fantastic the economic circumstances are in Vietnam. The last saving grace is gone. Whoops.
And the worst part about all of this is... I am still extremely PRIVILEGED compared to the average person in Vietnam. My parents are both start-up owners, so I get to live quite comfortably without having to worry about food or electricity bills, unlike many others less fortunate than I. But knowing that I'm better off compared to so many people doesn't inspire gratitude or confidence in me. It only makes me feel ashamed to be living in such a world, where the only true winner is inevitable decay and the rest of us are playing the part of the fool. Even the ones at the top.
What I went through was like a bucket of ice water in my face, making me realize just how inconsequential my childhood joys truly are. "Remember the good times", huh? Kiss my ass. Good luck following your own advice while dealing with a seemingly endless horde of customers while trying to steady your shaking arms carrying a tray to the other fucking side of the restaurant. So many people keep telling me that I'm too cynical and negative, but you know what? I bet a majority of them have never actually worked a full-time job before. Seeing them get proven wrong only further reinforces my beliefs that adulthood is not an age of freedom for most like it is advertised in Vietnam, but rather one of monotony and frustration, watching as any semblance of a spark or flair in you gets slowly and methodically washed away until everything around you becomes white noise. And that's me just after ONE MONTH of that shit. I can't even imagine how much pain I'd be in if I had to do that for the rest of my life.
If this is the kind of stuff I had to go through just to get by, then I really don't see the appeal in the state of living over the state of being dead. Like, if I'm such a burden to society and this world to the point where I have to inflict torture upon myself daily just to repay my debts and earn the right to exist, then what reason do I have for sticking around in a world that clearly doesn't want me? What's so good about living when "treading water" is the best the average person like me can hope for? The fact that people have to convince themselves that life is worth living with motivational quotes and thought-ending cliches really rubs me the wrong way, and now I'm not even sure whether they're trying to help others or trying to convince themselves. Sorry if I'm being too "edgy" or whatever for you, by the way. You can always just NOT read this if it bothers you that much.
Anyway, that's enough rambling from me for now. This summer holiday, my dad wants me to do it all over again. And you know what? I will. Because it's the best shot I have at increasing my chances of making it in this twisted place we call reality. Maybe, if I'm lucky enough, I'll find a different place to work in with less bullshit hours and more acceptable working conditions. I'll take anything at this point. Oh, and before I go... sorry for wasting your time, but you brought this upon yourself.

Btw I know I’m not cracked but I think I have a not so bad chance at getting in. The overconfident part is just clickbait. I do not think I’m guaranteed or even am going to get in.
What are my chances for Harvard?
Demographics: Asian American 😭 , Male, First Generation College student and Immigrant, low income student, 33k income, Uncompetitive and Underfunded, title 1 funded and eligible high school in fringe rural Ohio with basically no clubs and extracurriculars aside from music and sports. The school is surrounded by cornfields. School average ACT is 19. I got the highest ACT in my school and probably the only 36 in my county but idk.
ACT :36 Composite 36E 36M 35R 36S ✨
Unweighted GPA and Rank: current unweighted GPA 4.0UW / 4.622 weighted
Ranked 1/141 Coursework: 2 AP, school only offers 2, 17 dual enrollment in total by senior year, 8 Honors. Took the hardest classes available at my school.
Awards: 1. Prom Prince 💀 2. Student of the Month nominated by 3 different teachers at once and got Chick-fil-A 10th grade💀 3. Young Author Conference Award 4. Clark County Internship Award 5. Junior Homecoming Court 6. Probably NMQST Semifinalist (1480 PSAT)
Extracurriculars: 1. Family Responsibilities: worked at my parent's restaurant since 6th grade because child labor is awesome. Acted as a co-managecashiewaiter of the restaurant. Primary Translator and helped pay bills for the family since my parents don't know much English. Around 32 hours per week on weeks with sports. 40 hours per week during summer weeks when I have cross-country practice. This prevented me from doing any extracurriculars after school until the spring of sophomore year because of transportation and time issues. 6-12

1. Varsity Outdoor and Indoor Track: I train off-season and in my free time for all my sports because I really like doing them, researched effective ways to train instead of only doing my coach's ineffective workouts, Varsity Cross Country: varsity junior year 11-12
   
2. Newspaper Editor in Chief, established many new features as a founding member, junior year to senior year, the club is also becoming a class with yearbook so that too
   
3. Club Volleyball: founding member and helped fundraised to make the team year 10-11
   
4. Spanish Honor Society President: running for president senior year, will probably get the position 9-12
   
5. NHS: joining junior year because the school doesn't allow sophomores to join, also running for Pres 11-12
   
6. Teacher's Aide: helped pass around papers and students with their assignments, also helped teacher do other miscellaneous tasks, nothing much Peer Tutor: First and only peer tutor of my school's new tutoring program, barely tutored anyone since no one wanted to tutor, don't know if the program will last until next year, also help students unofficially, I also taught as a professor for a math class for fun so there’s that 10-12
   
7. Quick Recall, I answered a lot of questions and displayed leadership in a trivia competition club
   
8. Science Honor Society Vice President I created the club along with my friend, organized eclipse glasses project thingies
   
9. MITES Semester (I got in haven’t done it yet tho)
   

LORs: Super strong I'm super close with my teachers. They say I’m a genius (I’m not even close) They also think I’m a nice person 😃 (I am most of the time don’t worry)
Schools: HYPSM and other Ivies and T20s
Additional Info: I don't think my school has sent anyone to an HYPSM ever, most people just apply to local community colleges. The only student that I've heard that got into a T20 was someone who was recruited for Track for Cornell. This might make me stand out in terms of my school but idk how much that'll help. My school doesn't have a lot of resources and student interests in academics so I can't really start a club that much. I got accepted into an internship this summer but had to reject it because of my work at the restaurant and transportation issues. Overall there's not a lot of opportunities at my school and my circumstances also limited the few opportunities I had like sports. I hope my application would be evaluated based on my context and that AOs would see that I really tried to take advantage of anything I could as long as it didn't tax my family's financial situation.
Btw I’m also confident about my app becuz of my school lol. There was one Harvard applicant this year and they got waitlisted. They showed me their app and tbh it wasn’t that good. They didn’t know how to order their activities from most important to least and instead did it in a random order 💀. They also had quite a bit of B’s. They took 20 dual enrollment classes and zero AP classes. They didn’t take calculus and went test optional. They were president of like 3 clubs and was second for congressional art show. They were also very involved in band, played varsity golf for four years, and was section leader for marching band. She did come from a single parent household, but wasn’t FGLI. She applied as a bio premed major. Not saying she’s not smart (she’s definitely more talented than me) but she didn’t care about getting in that much so didn’t try as hard. She mostly applied for fun and still got waitlisted, so I think i have a decent chance tho my thinking might be flawed.

“The past and the future, considered apart from the consequences of their content, are empty as a dream, and the present is only the indivisible and unenduring boundary between them.” ― Arthur Schopenhauer, The World As Will And Representation

In Chapter 3, it's revealed by the medical records disk that Isa's name is shorthand for "Isolde." I wasn't familiar with this name, but I felt it was distinctive enough that there had to be some meaning behind it, so I did some digging.
One use of the name "Isolde" that caught my attention was that it is the name of a facility at CERN- the ISOLDE or Isotope Separator On Line DEvice, used to produce and separate radioactive isotopes of elements for research purposes. Given the game's frequent use of motifs relating to nuclear science and the health risks of radiation, it felt too specific to be incidental. Still, there wasn't much meaning I could derive from it, but I thought it was interesting enough to be worth pointing out.
The most prominent instance of that name is from the story of Tristan and Isolde, a celtic legend and a romantic tragedy often described as a precursor to Romeo and Juliet. There are many versions of the story told across different times and cultures, but given the game's many references to Romantic Era art from the German speaking world such as Schubert's Serenade and Böcklin's Isle of the Dead, I'm inclined to think it's specifically referencing Richard Wagner's opera "Tristan and Isolde". I'll give a quick synopsis here and analyze the parallels that I think may reflect Isa's role in the story. (To avoid confusion, from now on I will only use 'Isolde' to refer to the character from Tristan and Isolde while 'Isa' will refer to the one from Signalis, unless otherwise stated.)
It begins with Isolde on a ship, being escorted by the knight Tristan, from Ireland to Cornwall to marry Tristan's uncle, King Mark of Cornwall. It is an arranged marriage she is not keen on going through. In a fit of rage, she curses the ship, hoping it sinks and takes all of them with it, particularly Tristan. After learning that Tristan killed her original fiancé, she issues him an ultimatum that she will not willingly leave with him until he drinks with her as an atonement. In truth, she is planning to poison the both of them, and he suspects as much, but in an attempt to prevent this, her attendant replaced the poison with a love potion.
Though she ends up marrying King Mark between the first and second act, Tristan and Isolde can't ignore their passionate love. They realize the only time they can safely pursue their relationship is at night, when the King and the court aren't watching. As their patience for the night grows thinner, they realize the only way to realize their love is through the eternal night: Death. But at the same time, they are caught together by the King and his attendant. Without even attempting to explain his betrayal, he asks Isolde to follow him into death and impales himself on a sword.
In the third act, Tristan partially recovers from the suicide attempt but remains delirious. At the sound of a shepard's pipe in the distance, he reflects on the death of his parents, believing the pipe to be death now calling to him. He laments drinking the potion and how it led him to live a life of madness desiring something that can never be. He dies in Isolde's arms and she follows him into death. As the King arrives to the scene, Tristan's servant kills the King's attendant in revenge and then himself. Amidst all the death, the king reveals he had learned about the love potion and had simply come to offer his blessing to Tristan and Isolde, and the story ends with them finally realizing their love in the afterlife.
In writing this adaptation of the classic story, Wagner was reportedly inspired by the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, particularly his work "Die Welt ais Wille und Vorstellung" or "The World as Will and Representation." In "The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy", author Bryan Magee identifies Wagner's use of day and night as respective metaphors for "phenomenon", the aspects of the world we can perceive and "noumenon", the fundamentally unknowable reality beneath it. Both concepts were first named by Immanuel Kant, but Schopenhauer further argued that the gap between them is the cause of misery and suffering for all sentient beings; our individual pursuits and efforts to move towards a more personally favorable 'phenomenon' cannot be reconciled with a fundamentally uncertain state of the world and its other inhabitants. That to fulfill one desire requires the quashing of ten others. Illustrating this, he writes:

"...he saw an immense field entirely covered with skeletons, and took it to be a battle-field. However, they were nothing but skeletons of large turtles five feet long, three feet broad, and of equal height. These turtles come this way from the sea in order to lay their eggs, and are then seized by wild dogs... with their united strength, these dogs lay them on their backs, tear open their lower armour, the small scales of the belly, and devour them alive. But then a tiger often pounces on the dogs. Now all this misery is repeated thousands and thousands of times, year in year out. For this, then, are these turtles born. For what offence must they suffer this agony? What is the point of this whole scene of horror? The only answer is that the will-to-live thus objectifies itself."

Returning to Signalis, this quote immediately calls to mind the first-person Shores of Oblivion scene, in which skulls are buried and littered across the sand, and a quote from one of the nearby scattered papers:

we should have never left
the primordial soup
only through death can i escape
the call of the one who rules
above all life

Tristan and Isolde, realizing that their personal passions were irreconcilable with the interests of the material world they were in, concluded the only answer was to leave it behind altogether, so they made a death pact. A "promise", if you will. So upon finding Tristan dead, Isolde takes her own life. Much like how our Isa, who upon losing hope of being able to find Erika in the living world, disintegrates.
Another related theme connecting these stories is the lamentation of fate. Just as Isolde prays for the ship carrying her to her destiny to sink with her on it, and as Tristan regrets drinking the potion that led him to a life of desire for something that could never be, two early game quotes from Isa show that she is seeking Erika not just with love and concern but with regret for how they left things:

"Erika, if you find this note, despite everything that's happened. I've come to look for you."
"Have you ever wondered if you're speaking to someone for the last time without knowing? I wish I could go back, so I could say something else."

The details of this regret are deliberately ambiguous. It sounds like they had a fight or falling out, but 'everything that's happened' implies a deeper conflict- a disagreement or choice that they couldn't reconcile. Something important enough that it took Isa away from her sister, yet also something she regrets so greatly that she would take it all back just so she can see her sister one more time.
As Schopenhauer said, "A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants." The great tragedy at the center of Tristan and Isolde is that even if we have control of our actions, we are at the mercy of the desires we were given by fate. It's a theme that permeates not just Isa's story, but Signalis as a whole.
Elster never chose to love Ariane. Had she not, she might have found the strength to end her suffering before it was too late. So she ran away from the "day" of Ariane's suffering into the "night" of keeping her in cryosleep.
Ariane never chose to love art. Had she not, she could have had a simple and comfortable life fitting in with her peers. So she ran away from the "day" of the Eusan Nation's surveillance and social ridicule into the "night" of Penrose-512.
Falke lost any hope of finding happiness after becoming burdened with emotions and identity that she could do nothing to satiate, and quite literally went from the "day" of life into the "night" of dreaming.
And then there's Adler, all but crushed by helplessness as he tries in vain to hold back the death of reality, as Elster and Isa continue to bring about its apparent decay in pursuit of their own wills. The relationship between Adler and Isa is interesting and I think quite important, as he's the only character besides Elster who gets direct screen time with her. As the game bluntly mentions the first time Adler meets Isa,

NONE OF US ARE HERE BY CHOICE (And No One Will Miss Us)

It's from this and the Schopenhauerian interpretation of Tristan and Isolde that I think Adler represents phenomenon while Isa represents noumenon.
Adler wishes to preserve the light of day. To awaken from the dream and return to shared experience of a common, coherent reality. One where what you see is what you get. Where experiences can be trusted, and results are predictable.
Isa wishes to live in the night. The world of passion and of choice. Valuing the experience of familial love over all else, even the world or truth, she continues to live only in pursuit of another reality amidst the abyss of uncertainties, one where she made amends with her sister before it was too late, or never fell out with her at all. And when she finally accepts that she cannot find it or manifest it, much like her namesake, she concludes the "eternal night" is her last recourse.
There can be no perfect reconciliation between these two wills. It can never be day and night at the same time. And yet they do find themselves together- falling into the bottom of the mine. In the Nowhere, at the end of all things. At the sunset, the liminal space in between the night and day, between dreaming and waking. Because, one means nothing without the other.
To me that is the important take away from her story. That if we don't want to live in regret over the hand life dealt us- hating ourselves for being unable to fulfill the desires we were stuck with, before its too late, we must confront the question of which world we want to live in.
Is it truly better to have loved and lost then never loved at all? Is it truly better to have tried and failed than to never try? I don't want to believe the answer is no, but none of us can be certain for ourselves until we reason with ourselves honestly about why we struggle with the question in the first place- what the true value of each side of the coin is. Perhaps then we can accept what is beyond our control.
To quote Schopenhauer once more:

Every individual, every human apparition and its course of life, is only one more short dream of the endless spirit of nature, of the persistent will-to-live, is only one more fleeting form, playfully sketched by it on its infinite page, space and time; it is allowed to exist for a short while that is infinitesimal compared with these, and is then effaced, to make new room. Yet, and here is to be found the serious side of life, each of these fleeting forms, these empty fancies, must be paid for by the whole will-to-live in all its intensity with many deep sorrows, and finally with a bitter death, long feared and finally made manifest. It is for this reason that the sight of a corpse suddenly makes us serious.

#include  #include  #include  #include  #include  #include  #include  #include  #include  #include  namespace qml { struct property { std::string name; std::string value; }; struct element { std::string type; std::vector properties; std::vector children; }; } BOOST_FUSION_ADAPT_STRUCT(qml::property, name, value) BOOST_FUSION_ADAPT_STRUCT(qml::element, type, properties, children) namespace qi = boost::spirit::qi; namespace phoenix = boost::phoenix; template  struct QmlParser : qi::grammar { QmlParser() : QmlParser::base_type(start) { using namespace qi; quoted_string %= lexeme['"' >> +(char_ - '"') >> '"']; unquoted_string %= lexeme[+(char_ - (char_("{") char_("}") char_(":") char_(";") qi::space))]; property_rule %= unquoted_string >> ':' >> (quoted_string unquoted_string); properties_rule %= *property_rule; element_rule %= unquoted_string >> '{' >> properties_rule >> *element_rule >> '}'; start = element_rule; } qi::rule quoted_string; qi::rule unquoted_string; qi::rule property_rule; qi::rule(), qi::space_type> properties_rule; qi::rule element_rule; qi::rule start; }; void print_element(const qml::element& el, int indent = 0) { std::string indentation(indent, ' '); std::cout << indentation << "Element type: " << el.type << "\n"; for (const auto& prop : el.properties) { std::cout << indentation << " Property: " << prop.name << " = " << prop.value << "\n"; } for (const auto& child : el.children) { print_element(child, indent + 2); } } int main(int argc, char* argv[]) { if (argc != 2) { std::cerr << "Usage: " << argv[0] << " " << std::endl; return 1; } std::ifstream file(argv[1]); if (!file) { std::cerr << "Error: Could not open file " << argv[1] << std::endl; return 1; } std::stringstream buffer; buffer << file.rdbuf(); std::string input = buffer.str(); auto it = input.begin(); auto end = input.end(); qml::element root; QmlParser parser; bool r = qi::phrase_parse(it, end, parser, qi::space, root); if (r && it == end) { std::cout << "Parse success\n"; print_element(root); } else { std::cout << "Parse failed\n"; std::cout << "Remaining unparsed: '" << std::string(it, end) << "'\n"; } return 0; } 

ApplicationWindow { visible: true width: 640 height: 480 title: "Nested QML Example" Rectangle { id: rect1 visible: true width: 800 height: 600 title: "Advanced QML with JavaScript Example" Rectangle { id: mainRect width: parent.width height: parent.height color: "#f0f0f0" ColumnLayout { anchors.centerIn: parent spacing: 20 Text { text: "Advanced QML with JavaScript" font.pixelSize: 24 Layout.alignment: Qt.AlignCenter } RowLayout { spacing: 10 Layout.alignment: Qt.AlignCenter Button { id: button1 text: "Button 1" } Button { id: button2 text: "Button 2" } Button { id: button3 text: "Button 3" } } Rectangle { width: 200 height: 100 color: "#ffcc00" radius: 10 Text { id: messageLabel text: "Press a button" anchors.centerIn: parent font.pixelSize: 18 } } Slider { id: slider width: 300 from: 0 to: 100 value: 50 } ProgressBar { id: progressBar width: 300 value: slider.value } } } } } 

I've never had a good history with women, my biological mother never wanted me, nor did my next three step mothers after that, my first girlfriends parents didn't want their daughter dating a white boy so they moved to another state, a lot of new "friends", and to top it off a girl that had a boyfriend the day after our first date.
And as of four days ago a girl that sent me a text stating "Sorry, not interested, never was." I haven't had much money for a while and I finally scraped together a few extra bucks to take her out. I never expected a yes but I also didn't expect a no. You can't be hurt by something you didn't want to happen if you stopped wanting anything.
I like to consider myself a good judge of character. I was able to tell immediately with my best friend that he had some severe childhood trauma. Well low and behold a month after we met him and I showed up to class one day with a redbull for each other since we'd been on the phone for 6 hours the previous night and got jack shit for sleep.
But I wasn't able to see anything in her, the best way I can describe it was a Locked box, there were only a handful of keys and the ones that existed were already in the hands of the people who needed them, and to make a new one would be long and difficult. When we met it seemed like it was going to work out, and for a while it was. I don't know if I responded too fast, or if I just came on too strong.
All my friends keep telling me to stop worrying about it and that if she was the one she would've gone out with me. And I'm half and half on that, I don't want to stop worrying out of fear that I'll grow numb to the pain, after a while I grew numb to the abuse that my stepmother's gave me and that scared the shit out of me. But on the other hand if she was the one then she would've, it still doesn't change the fact that I've never met a girl like her and I doubt I'll never see one again.
My great grandmother always had a way with quotes, one of the ones she said that I'll never forget goes "one trashed man is another woman's treasure" as time goes on that quote gets less and less believable. But in the end I forgot why I stopped talking to girls, and life put me in my place. I expect the same to happen in about a year or so.

I'd like to share a lengthy and self-indulgent note about my history with the Baha'i community and the impact it had on my family and me. It's worth noting that I'm sharing this using a throwaway Reddit account that I generally reserve for browsing porn. I find funny to imagine a Baha'i apologist reading this, becoming angry and judgmental, and then, investigating my profile and ending up jerking off. With that said, let's dive into my story.
I want to share my experience in case it resonates with someone else, a lot of the stories on this Reddit helped me, and perhaps my story will give some comfort to someone else. It has taken me a while to write this down, and I'm glad I finally got around to doing it.
My parents emigrated from their homeland for reasons of principle and value. Upon their arrival, they were greeted by Baha'is who met them. And so, lovebombed and lavished with love, praise, and celebration for moving countries due to values that they portrayed as being closely aligned with the Baha'i faith, my parents fell for this validation and worked very hard once they became Baha'is in the mid-1980s.
My dad got rid of all of his whiskies, and swiftly, my parents began hosting potlucks and fireside chats, diligently working to integrate into the Baha'i ecosystem. Back then, the atmosphere was fairly light-hearted, with devotional gatherings, prayers, and a somewhat 1960s-esque hippie vibe. There was live guitar music, and joss sticks.
However, I remember Baha'i classes having an interesting edge. We were taught that Buddhists were not following a religion but merely a way of life, and that Hindus had become pantheistic because they had lost the core of their faith and religion, which had become corrupted over time. Thanks to Google, I can discover that yes indeed, this is from Lights of Guidance.
There was a significant emphasis on the importance of gender equality and the oneness of humanity – because, hey, the eighties. I feel sad there isn't anything anymore about the Virtues project - even if the Virtues project was sort of framed like it was created by Bahais.
Even in the 1980s, there was an overwhelming atmosphere that the key to being a good Baha'i was how you presented yourself rather than your actual behaviour. I recall learning an apocryphal tale of a young Baha'i who, while fasting, participated in an aerobics class and nearly fainted (yeah, aerobics, this is a real 80s fable), but was told by another Baha'i to prioritize representing the faith well over completing the fast because *it looked bad*. From a very early age, I learned the importance of putting the right face forward.
My parents then took their relationship with the Baha'i faith to the next level and volunteered at the World Centre in Haifa. As a child, this was a pretty interesting experience. I was suddenly immersed in the Iranian, or rather, Persian community, with its strong culture of martyrdom. Even as a child, every event seemed to feature graphic videos depicting young kids being taken from their homes. It was quite frightening, and I remember being afraid.
I also recall a strong sense of hierarchy within the community. My family lived in a small apartment with a very old, busted-up car from the 1970s, while others resided in nice homes with pleasant views and drove nice cars. I attended a local Israeli school, which was a cultural experience in itself, while my peers my age went to the much fancier American school. It's important to note that, at this point, the conversation about the "great catastrophe" – two-thirds of the world's population dying, leading to a period of peace and the entry by troops – was a prevalent topic openly discussed at the World Centre.
We completed our stint there, even living through the Gulf War. Upon returning to my birth country, my parents chose to live in places with smaller Baha'i communities, as they wanted to support and help establish Local Spiritual Assemblies. Things had changed by this point, not only because I was a teenager but also because the community itself had transformed. There was a significant Iranian presence everywhere, and the focus had shifted heavily towards rules, especially those related to sex, drinking, and drug use. There was also a huge emphasis on financial contributions to the faith, and it was the first time I began to see a somewhat materialistic outlook within the community.
As a preteen and teenager, I engaged in activities like dropping off flyers in mailboxes and soliciting strangers to talk about this great new religion, all in the name of “teaching”. I joined the local choir and sang, inspired by a crush I had on a girl there. This was probably the golden time of the community, with the choir doing outreach and a balance between Western and Iranian believers.
However, things began to accelerate. The Ruhi Institute and teaching became significant focal points. I was encouraged to bring a good friend of mine to a Baha'i camp, and once there, I was pressured to ask him to convert. It was very uncomfortable.
This Reddit loves cringe stories, so here is a winner: I had a birthday party with my non-Baha'i friends, and two older Baha'i girls attended. One of the girls ended up stalking my friend, showing up at his workplace and calling him at home with sexually suggestive comments. The matter was escalated to the Local Spiritual Assembly, but instead of talking to me about it, they basically ended my friendship with this kid. To me, this somehow captures so much of what it was like to be a Baha'i child and how Baha'i adults treat children to this day.
When I turned 15, I signed up for Baha'i membership because it was the expected thing to do. However, by the time I was in my early 20s and studying at university, I had started to interact more with the local, real-world community. This might seem like a small thing, but it was actually quite significant. You see, my parents had always felt a little bit on the outside compared to the average person on the street around them. This sense of elitism was really exacerbated by being a Baha'i because Baha'is would walk around in a cloud of self-assurance, slapping each other on the back and saying , "We don't do drugs. We've got all the answers and solutions, not like you." That was pretty much the attitude. It felt very socio-economic, with a lot of judgment towards working-class people. When the Iranians arrived, the cultural judgments grew even stronger.
But I was working in restaurants and learning about booze from bartenders. I had gotten to know real people. I had lost my virginity, and all that Bahai jazz seemed so much less relevant. I hardly even noticed when the year 2000 arrived without the predicted apocalypse, entry by troops, or any of the other anticipated events. Life went on. I lived in another country and met a girl, and we lived together.
Here is cringe story #2: my girlfriend /fiancé and I hosted a Bahai couple from my hometown. Despite being in my late 20s and engaged, and even though I hosted this gentleman in my house and helped him with his preparations for his business and presentations in the country where I lived, he reported to the Local Spiritual Assembly that I was living with a woman and we weren't married. It was absolutely amazing. The level of judgment still grosses me out.
I started to reflect on what the religion had meant to me and saw how it had changed. The obsession with fundraising was becoming ever more strident and panicked. The gaps in the actual scriptural logic of the religion were becoming more exacerbated as real-world problems still ran rife, and real-time discussions on social media brought these issues to light. It took me a while to start really digging into it, and it was only much later, when I started therapy, that I realized I needed to formally resign from the religion.
Looking back, it's astonishing how this religion, which professes to have such blind equality between the genders, as if other religions have some kind of hardwired sexism, actually had hardwired sexism in how the Universal House of Justice operates. A religion that taught the oneness of humanity, as if all humanity is equal and other religions don't recruit from anyone they can find, places divisors. Although of course, Bahai’s can’t recruit from Israeli Jews, so much for oneness of humanity. But this religion has taught that all humanity is equal, unless, of course, you're gay. Then you can't get married, let alone have sex.
There are other principles I haven't touched on, such as non-involvement in politics, unless it involves things happening to Baha'is or politics in Iran. The principle of independent investigation of the truth doesn't seem to work if you might investigate something that's not in line with the Baha'i perspective. The idea of a universal language? I don't really see any evidence that they're even really thinking about that one. The unity between science and religion? A religion that only allows men to sit on its senior board of a global theocracy probably isn't going to jive with a contemporary scientific perspective…. I mean, apparently you don't need a penis to be a man anymore, right?
In between these moments are my colorful memories of random things, like endless discussions about the boundaries of physical intimacy, people getting married at the age of 16 because they had exemptions for being Persian, and meeting Ms. Khanoom in Israel, feeling some sadness that the lone woman who at least brought some feminine energy to the World Centre is now gone, replaced by 12 boring men.
I've had conversations with my wife where I tried to explain what Baha'is actually do. She just wonders why they aren't doing stuff like normal religions do, like reading to the elderly or supporting schools for the disabled. I explain that's not the target demographic. I remember a wealthy man brought to firesides who obviously nobody else wanted to listen to, but we all sat around and applauded him like he was a great ukulele player and a clever man. He pointed out a hilariously Iranian man who was an alternative healer, and they got into a debate about modern medicine. The wealthy man said, "Well, you should see my daughter and what she studied. She studies Law." And then quickly changed the subject when asked about her name since I studied at the same Law school. Here's this man who's self-aware enough to join the adoration of his crowd but doesn't want his daughter mixed up in it in any way. Absolutely hilarious. Make that cringe story #3.
This reflection was sort of sparked when my wife and I discovered that the writings attributed to Rumi, which Baha'is often quote, is the same guy who started the Whirling Dervishes. We read about Rumi and I realized just how different he is from Baha'u'llah. Rumi wrote poetry, but he didn't pretend to be a prophet of God. He was just offering a different dynamic for how to interpret spirituality. He didn't say he was part of some sort of cycle. There's something beautiful about that simplicity. And needless to say, Rumi lived long before the Baha'is ever started.
It makes me wonder, will anyone ever watch the equivalent of a whirling dervish dance for the Baha'is?
The obsession with appearances sounds like a joke, but it isn't. It wasn't for me. Some bad stuff happened to me on my trip to Israel. When we got there, my parents didn't understand why I was so upset about everything. It was a culture shock, attending a local school, not speaking Hebrew, being lumped together with Russian kids who also didn't speak Hebrew, and getting beaten up in the toilet. It wasn't a very good time for me.
So, I was sent to counsel with a local Israeli counselor. After several sessions, she instructed that I had to sit down with my parents and tell them what I needed to tell them, particularly about the shadow that had come over me since coming to Israel. My parents were enraged when I said, “I wish we never became Bahai”.
And so, we returned from the Holy Land and moved to a tiny community that was struggling to get members. To this day, my parents are still members. I've resigned so I'm never dubbed a "covenant breaker." I'm pretty sure my parents know that I resigned because they literally never raise the topic of the Baha'i faith with me. I wish the religion had some interesting cosmology, something mystical, some interesting new take on the universe, or provided my family with tools to handle being migrants or raising teenagers. At the very least, it could have given us a common language we could have used to bond together. It did none of that.
But to be fair, if it wasn't the Baha'is, some other rinky-dink cult would have love-bombed my parents back in the 1980s. Of course, it would have been so much more fun if it had featured more sex and drugs 😊

So for some context I am disabled and can only work about 2-3 days a week. Used to be able to work more but I can't any more.
Both of our parents are dead and I have manic depressive bipolar plus ADHD and meds do not seem to help much. Whereas my aunt has anger issues and ptsd. And I live with my aunt because of this. My brother (25M) and I (27F) have never really gotten along, he used to chase around with knives and torture me essentially.
He has been in and out of prison and has 3 kids. Well last year he got out of prison and his baby momma didn't want anything to do with him so I let him stay with me. He did not have a job but was looking for one, he did get food stamps and helped around the house though, so I had no issue with it.
I had a really cushy stay at home job at the time that worked with my disabilities and I loved it. Then my grandmother went on hospice so I had to take care of her too. Then while she was on hospice at my house he asked if his baby momma could stay for a couple of days so grandma could see his newborn so I said yes. It went downhill from there.
Grandma passed, I asked him to help me clean out grandma's apartment because I couldn't do it on my own. I also paid him to help so he would bring it to my house so I could go through it later when it was so fresh. He didn't even bring half of it, the safe as missing and he stole and sold stuff and I didn't trust him after that
He would also use my Doordash account to make himself money then not help pay bills or find a different job. They would not clean up after themselves and got mad at me for trying to. Their (Grandma’s) room looked like a DCFS case. I tried to kick them out multiple times but they wouldn't leave and since they stayed over 2 weeks the cops couldn't do anything.
They took over grandmas room f*cked on her Deathbed and let their 3 year old wipe his feces from his diaper onto my 60” tv and just left it there for me to find after it had crusted.
The job terminated me because of the background noise of them and the 2 kids screaming and them beating each other. So I couldn't take it anymore, so since they wouldn't leave I did and I moved in with my aunt.
Now it's a year later they got kicked out of that apartment, moved to Effingham and got into an argument with his BM’s mom and he ripped the door off the hinges and she kicked them out. My aunt went to go get them now the cycle is repeating and she just doesn't seem to care because and I quote “that's our family and my grandbabies.”
So because they f*cked up I am screwed again. I pay the majority of bills since I work and my aunts on Disability. So if I leave she loses the house, but I don't see any other option. I can't do this again, I just can't.
So here I might be the asshole. I know if I leave she’ll get kicked out and it's not like I make enough to pay the bills and save enough to leave anyway. I brought this up several times but she just doesn't seem to understand.
So I don't know what to do. I just feel lost and stuck. So I'm going to tell her (my aunt) tomorrow, that it's them ( which is him his 3 kids and his baby momma) or me but I already know which one she'll pick, so wish me luck.

I (14F) am in 8th grade and want to ask out a guy in my grade. I've known him since fifth grade, and we were actually friends in fifth grade. I've fallen in love with him. I'm also moving away to a different school next year because of my parents jobs. I'm gonna ask him out on the last day of school in June. We have one short class together every other day. Thank god we have this class on the last day of school! Here's my plan to ask him out: Ask him if he'll sign my yearbook (I bet he'll say yes cuz we're friendly-ish with each other), then I'll ask him if I can sign his yearbook. After signing it, I will put my love poem I've written for him, in between his yearbook sticking out. It has a yes and no box to check. We'll see how it goes. Is this a good plan? Y'all tell me if you want me to type out the poem, too.

I started working at a captive agency about five years ago. I was hired to do admin work and eventually be the office manager as the agency grew. My boss has been in insurance for over a decade but switched over to captive before hiring me. My boss was a top selling agent shattering records and sales in my first three or four years there. This year took a turn. I noticed it around the time we hired more staff. Our roles were all fine tuned and I started taking on more policy reviews and reviewing quotes with prospective clients. When I was hired I made it extremely clear that I did not want to sell. I was told I would never have to. Cut to five years later. My boss sits in their office doing personal things all day. They sit on the phone organizing their kids activities, calling other parents, or online shopping. We went from 30 policies a month to 5. The only leads that come in are referrals that I am then expected to close. With the market the way it is, I’ve spent the last five months reviewing existing policies to cross sell and reviewing quotes with referrals. My boss grills me on a daily basis about why we aren’t closing enough leads. I am constantly asked why we don’t have any life policies. All while my boss sits in their office tending to personal items. Since we hired staff I am doing little to no admin work. I am quoting, reviewing quotes, or reviewing policies. We have not met a single goal this year. Every staff meeting is a discussion on why we aren’t cross selling more. I am supposed to be the office manager but every decision about processes is shut down by my boss. I have zero autonomy. I get the sense my boss is using me as a proxy to sell.
I don’t want to sell. I’m being paid very well. I don’t make commission but get paid a salary. But I don’t want to sell and never wanted to sell and yet here I am. Selling. Not to mention the policies we do get, these people don’t even know who my boss is. They think I’m their agent and they are referring me left and right.
I am beginning to worry. If my boss keeps this up, I foresee money drying up. Am I over reacting? I’ve tried suggesting hiring sales people but none of them cut it and end up quitting. They aren’t selling either.

An associate of mine recently committed suicide. He was a Master Sergeant in the United States Air Force. On November 28, 2022, he went onto the Langley AFB in Hampton, Virginia and hung himself. When I heard of the sad news, I was in shock and disbelief and I was devastated! I hadn’t seen or heard from him in about four or five years but we had a history together. I cared for him as a friend.
I was an Air Force wife for about ten years. In 2011, my ex-husband and I had gotten stationed at Langley Air Force Base, in Hampton, Virginia. About four years later, in 2015, we met the Montalvos. We all hung out a few times, whether it was a movie, going out to eat or inviting them to cookouts at our home. I remember how Master Sergeant Octavio Montalvo used to always have me laughing so hard, every time we all hung out together. He had an animated way of describing situations and sharing how he would respond in those situations. He kept us laughing. These are bitter-sweet memories now because he’s gone in one of the worse ways imaginable! I heard of the situation leading up to his suicide and, the way he responded to it is, by no means, a laughing matter (at all)!
Suicide is a pain that never goes away! When we kill ourselves, we may escape our pain but we transfer it to everyone we leave behind, who is connected to us. The pain of loss that he escaped was transferred to his parents, wife, son, younger brother, sister and other close family members, as well as close and distant friends. As I stated earlier, I hadn’t spoken with Octavio in about four or five years and when I heard what happened, I broke down crying and then I wept. I wept for days afterward. I kept thinking to myself, “Not him! I can’t believe it. Not Montalvo!” I could’ve believed it to be anybody BUT…him! I remembered him as the happy, funny jokester. But life — one of the worst parts of life — got ahold of him and wouldn’t let go. So he let go. And he left behind a lot of broken hearts. What he did hurt people that he never thought it would hurt. It affected people that he didn’t believe cared. Over a month later, I shed tears as I wrote this blog about him. It still hurts. I hurt for him. I still keep thinking, “There’s no do-overs. He’s not coming back. It’s over”. And that’s so very, very, very, very sad to me!
We never know who we affect with our permanent absence from this earth. The lies in our head tell us that no one cares about us and that those we care about will be better off without us. I couldn’t tell Montalvo, but I want to take the opportunity to tell any suicidal person who reads this, to give it one more day! ONE MORE DAY! PLEASE! — ONE. MORE. DAY! I can promise you that time makes a difference! I’ve been there myself. I’ve lived the extremely reckless life, not caring and hoping to die. I’ve strongly desired to just fall asleep and not wake up again. I’ve cried myself to sleep many nights. And I’ve woken up crying, many times, with tears streaming down the sides of my face before I could even open my eyes from my sleep. I’ve overdosed. I’ve raced down the road going close to 100 miles per hour, beating the steering wheel and wanting to die. I’ve tried to buy a gun to blow my brains out. And I’ve tried to hang myself too — but the door broke. I wrestled with suicidal ideations and attempts for about twenty years. All I needed was one more day.
Tomorrow came and it didn’t get better. So, I needed one more day! The next day came and things were worse! So, I needed one more day! MY GOD!!!! I needed one more day! I wouldn’t be here, living a better life, had I succeeded in any of my suicidal attempts. I wouldn’t be here as a living testimony to the goodness that one more day brings. Somebody needs me! Somebody needs the hope of my life story. Somebody needs you too and they need the hope of your life story!
Oftentimes, it gets WAY worse, before it gets better. And that’s the truth! But, what’s also true is that, when it gets worse, it means that it’s about to get better! Maybe not today, tomorrow, next week or next year. But, I can guarantee you one thing: with Jesus, it has no choice but to get better! I’m remembering a quote from a prison inmate I used to correspond with. He said, “Tough times don’t last; tough people do”. You’re stronger than you think! You’ve been through worse! Everything you’ve been through has made you stronger … TOUGHER!
The Lord God, Yahweh, is training you for a battle that’s only suited for the best! You’re chosen and destined for a greatness that no one can fulfill like YOU can fulfill it! It’s like the Marines. Not just anyone can join and make it through the Marine Corp (or any other military branch)! You have to have GRIT! You have to be tough. And it starts with training the MIND! You’ve come way too far in life — in the training — to give up now! There is no turning back. So you may as well put another foot forward and take one more step. Rest, if you must, but don’t give up! Because it gets a whole lot better and, when life is at its hardest, that means a rest-break is right around the corner! You’re not as weak as you were when you first started. You have core strength now. Look back over your life and see how far you’ve come. You’ve said that you couldn’t make it before but you did! Your resume says that you’re a survivor. One of the few. One of the proud! Give it one more day because suicide is not the answer. Suicide is actually the pain that never goes away!
— NaTarsha Harris

Alright, I'm going to describe a maladaptive thing I believe:
There are whole people with inner voices and internal lives and higher cognitive functions and there are simple people who are more like, I don't know, animals or chatbots. I'm going to quote a tweet I read because it sums it up: "as someone who contains multitudes its so annoying talking to someone who contains a single tude. u can tell right away."
It isn't as simple as 'I think I'm smarter than other people.' In fact, my developmentally delayed unemployed-living-with-parents ass feels like the dumbest person on earth sometimes. I'm talking about a different thing that's harder to define. My idea of Full Personhood is mostly based on verbal acuity; when I talk to someone who's inarticulate and unfunny I feel like my brain is being tazed. On the inside I'll be thinking: "you're beneath me. You're barely even sentient. I degrade myself by talking to you." Doesn't matter what we're talking about. I'll mentally dehumanize a person because of their opinions on Bluey.
This is why it takes me an eternity to write anything, including this post. Which sucks because fiction writing is one of my hobbies. The number one piece of writing advice I get is to write a huge, really bad first draft as quickly as possible. I cannot do this. You have no idea how high the stakes are. When I read crappy prose I feel genuinely angry at whoever wrote it. I keep imagining my 'peers' having a similar feeling while reading my writing (a fate worse than death.) Ergo, it feels perfectly logical to me that if I post bad fanfiction on the internet, I may as well DIE. I lose part of my SOUL. People tell me my writing is really good. Same for my art. This doesn't reassure me, because the people telling me my writing is good don't have standards. I can tell because I've seen *other* stuff they like and it's all ew ew ew ew ew ew ew.
It's difficult for me to just *let go* of this mentality, and stop holding myself to this standard, because then won't *I* just become one of them? 'Yeah, sure, why don't I just lobotomize myself and spend all day gazing slack-jawed into the middle distance while my friends and family watch sadly?'
Based on what I just described in this post you might imagine that in real life I come across as a pompous dipshit but I do, in fact, act like a normal human most of the time, including toward people my brain screams at me about. But this is always running in the background. See what I did there? Referring to 'my brain' as an external force, as if it's someone else thinking this shit and not just me? That was dishonest. As insane as it sounds written down, I do believe this, and I don't act contrary to it because deep down inside I am a kind soul; I just don't want to get caught.
It's the same reason I feel bad when I'm consoling my friends. They'll apologize for crying or venting to me and I'll say: "you don't have to apologize; I'm doing this because I love you and it's worth it", but inside I'm thinking: "I hate this and I wish you'd shut up, but I can't say that because then I'd sound like an asshole and you'd stop liking me". People tell me that thoughts alone have no morality and it's what you say that matters etcetcetc. Ok. But that either means that I live in a world in which everyone else is also constantly thinking mean shit about me OR I am a uniquely evil person. Which is better? I DON'T KNOW!
ANYWAY: How do I make it stop? How do I persuade myself to stop. Help.

I recently found out that my brother and cousin (they’re the same age as each other- 19) were at a club hangout with people that were drinking. I talked to them and the swore on Allah that they weren’t drinking they were just trying to get in the same energy as their friends
In this talk my cousin came forward and told me about other stuff they did with these friends in the past. My brother on the other hand was quiet and just didn’t say much. Later on I find out my brother put our cousin on blast and embarrassed him in front of their friends calling him a snitch, that quote “he didn’t give a f**k I found out.
My issue is I don’t know if I should tell my parents and let them deal with him as he’s more than likely to do it again if I’m the only one who knows. Their friends are family money rich so they don’t care if they get in trouble or not, as for us we’re just regular middle class.
Sorry for the long post and help with deeply be appreciated

so a little bit of a preface: we've only been together 1 year but he was in a long term relationship from the age of ~13 to ~20 years old. he's told me before he was unsure about us being super committed because he was in SUCH a committed relationship for so long (i.e: they did EVERYTHING together, because her parents weren't in the picture a whole lot due to their professions) so he said he was still trying to figure himself out as an individual (which i was and am 100% okay with, we're still super young and im still figuring myself out too!) BUT this is MY first very serious relationship, i've been in other relationships but i always knew they were temporary and never felt about those people the ways i feel about my current boyfriend.
onto the story: he's been having a really tough few days. he's been very short with me and has sounded completely uninterested in my existence anytime i've talked to him in the past few days but i brushed it off and tried to remain understanding. today though i felt like he was being the mean person he was being to himself in his head, to me. i'm a very understanding and supportive person in general but especially to him because i love him. so by the end of the day we were sitting in the gym parking lot when he said he needed to do a favor for his mom but didn't have his debit card on him in order to do the favor. he asked if he could use apple pay, i said yes and tried to explain it to him but he was in a bad mood and wasn't trying to hear me out and insisted on going home to find his debit card yelling at me "that's the only way it's going to work." i said okay, no problem and held back my tears as he got out of my car and into his own. he softened up a bit and told me to have a good work out, i told him i was just going to go home. i was feeling defeated and not particularly motivated to workout anymore and so i gave him back the energy drink he bought me and we played a game of hot potato before i finally put it back in his car. long story short, i accidentally ran the drink over and he called me and yelled at me about it.
we had a very heated discussion about the way he was treating me today for about 30 mins before calming down and both apologizing for our parts played. then i drove to his house so we could kiss & make up, essentially. when i got to his house we started talking about things again and he said he felt like a disappointment and a fuck up. so, i started trying to help him sort through these feelings because i don't think those things about him and neither does anyone else around him.
we talked for about an 1.5 hrs and the conversation finally ended because he said, and i quote, "MY problems are MY problems, they're not for you to begin picking my brain and trying to solve them. i don't want to open up to you, i don't want to tell you everything that's on my mind. i don't want you or need you solving my problems or giving me advice on how to live my life. i don't want or need a therapist, if i do open up to you it's not because i want advice from you. i don't spend time with you for your advice. i'll live and learn, let me live."
i apologized for overstepping his boundary and told him i would no longer give him advice on his issues.
my issue now is, where do we go from here? how are we supposed to build anything or truly feel anything for each other if he isn't willing to be open and honest? i don't WANT to therapize him, i just want to help him through his issues now and in the future so we can continue to build something together.
am i overreacting and being overbearing? is this normal? i'm a very solution driven person, and it seems to me like he just wants to dwell in his feelings and frankly in his self-pity. he says all of these horrible things about himself to me, and i just don't see those qualities in him that he sees so i try to help him see himself from my point of view and get to the bottom of why he feels this way. is that wrong?