Famous is different from working. I have known plenty of artists who just hustle and make a living - singing telegrams, weddings, bar gigs, teaching, they make enough to get by. They are working musicians.

Then there are all those bands who plug on, famous but not wildly so, I think they are making enough to live on just their band earnings.

Then a very few who get rich. Mostly those are kids of connected people, not always but often.

It’s the same with any entertainment industry, right? Average earnings on onlyfans is something like $3 a month.

And there is just So Much Talent in the world, and people have limited entertainment budgets.

It’s really hard to have a routine when your work schedule is irregular. I don’t think you are wrong to rely on easy to prepare stuff but you need more nutrition, yes? My kids say I have ADD, and most of them do, my second to youngest was having trouble because Adderall so I got her some easy things.

Bagged salad packs with the dressing.

Packaged Hummus from the grocery, on Triscuit crackers, has a lot of calories with fiber & nutrition from the hummus.

Apple with sliced cheese or peanut butter

Do you like tuna? Make tuna salad at the beginning of the week, or a can dumped on one of the aforementioned bagged salad mixes.

Hard boiled eggs last a long time in the fridge, also an egg dropped into your ramen would add nutrition.

Keep your work schedule in your phone calendar and set an alarm for dinner.

For breakfast cold fermented oatmeal is amazing, we call it summer oatmeal. Mix rolled oats with yogurt, coconut water and/ or kombucha/kvass/tepache if you have it, juice or water if you don’t. Mix in dried fruit and nuts and seeds, even chocolate if you want. It should start a little sloppy as the oats will take up the liquid. Taste and adjust, sweeten if you want, I don’t. Put it in the fridge and each morning take a little for breakfast.

And also, don’t stress about eating regularly if you don’t have weight issues. If your body is feeling ok and staying in a healthy size you don’t need to force yourself.

I hate to be the one to tell you this, but your dad is a racist.

I would say it’s a shining example of my theory. He wants to go back to when he was ignorant of the struggles of other people. They did exist, he just didn’t know and now he does.

+3 or so, benign neglect, with unavoidable trauma. My dad died when I was a teenager and that sucked, my mom fell apart, also she was diagnosed bipolar and I didn’t enjoy being a child at all, but do honestly believe my mom did her best, and we were fed, housed, schooled, (ETA including sports! She was big on physical fitness, and that is something that absolutely ended up improving my adult life, once I recovered from my own disordered/restrictive eating) and not interfered with much beyond that.

What score would the over-involved helicopter parents of my kids’ friends land on this scale, though? Those kids aren’t spoiled exactly but certainly not neglected.

I think people who think the past was better are all white men, and it’s because they didn’t have to think about other people. They want to go back to ignorance.

He literally says that to you? The 1950s? Have you asked him specifically why? My mom had a great time in the 1950s and no way would she ever have wanted the world to go backwards to that time. She recognized, as she became older, how bad things were for her mom, for black kids (her school was segregated), for so many people.

The only reason I can imagine wanting to go to the past, is to try to make this future better, but I know better than to fuck with the timeline and can’t imagine I’d be able to do anything about it anyway.

Hozier

Father John Misty

SZA

Tyler Childers

And oh my God, the juggernaut that is Fontaines DC

ETA I agree with Future Islands.

When I was a dancer - if one of us was injured, they made us come & watch the practice because apparently your body does gain knowledge just by watching.

But that was with a baseline knowledge already.

I think it would help, learning about swimming before doing it. More so if you are already physically active in some other way though.

Radio. I still listen to radio over the airwaves, and received by an antenna, as it has been done since 1920.

Bicycles are not much different since around 1900.

English to Vietnamese or Vietnamese to English is harder than, say English to Spanish or Arabic because the sounds are so very different - I am sure I simply can’t hear some of the different sounds in tonal languages, and had a friend who moved here from Taiwan when she was so young she learned better in English than Taiwanese but still she could not hear the difference between ear and year.

I don’t think it’s impossible but do think it’s unusual. My dad was bilingual English and Spanish and I wish my parents had done the “one speaks English one speaks Spanish” language immersion but we only spoke English at home.

I’m American. I regularly walk to the shop that’s 1.75 km, won’t drive it because it’s too close.

The closest Real Grocery is 2.5km, that I take electric bike. Same for the Whole Foods that’s much farther (5.5km) but that I consider an adventure ride and certainly not a walk. The groceries would melt by the time I got home if I walked.

All of these my husband drives to, and I think that’s more typical. I have hangups about driving short distances.

I don’t use my car much anymore, so would consider that liquid, and could make the kids pay some rent now they are working (not much), if I sold that and nothing in the house needed repaired or maintained (ha ha ha) I am at almost 3 years. So I guess if I had some fatal illness and was willing to run out all of both my &my husband’s retirement money I could stop working. Well, no, nevermind, I couldn’t, because the medical care would bankrupt us. But we would not immediately starve anymore. It only took half a century to get here!

I have eclectic taste in music. Mostly I give thanks for streaming services and radio - back when we had to buy albums I got literal anxiety because there was simply no possible way I could get even 1% of what I liked, and the thought of cataloguing it also oppressed me.

So -

I do read Brooklyn Vegan occasionally for stuff I might not have heard of, and tours, Pitchfork for live versions of songs.

I also let the streaming algorithm have its way with my playlist often, when not listening to a whole album. And I listen to radio (literal FM community radio) shows I like, and sometimes my kids scoop me on some artist they think I will like. And understand that the universe of music I might enjoy is blessedly so large I will not get to the end of it.

Oh and I go to concerts - often I have found bands because they opened for someone I went to see.

My kids have theoretical public transportation to school, work, we live near the bus routes in several directions.

To work or the high school - that bus runs 1 times per hour. So they can only arrive very early or very late, and it’s about an hour walk to either of those.

The bus route to the university is actually pretty good, runs every half hour, and takes about 40 minutes to get there (vs. 10-15 minutes drive) then you have to trust your luck with the loop runner bus that goes from the transit center around the campus, that adds between 10 minutes and an hour, randomly because it has no schedule, just drives the loop all day and arrives whenever. There is an app that tracks it so you can know whether to risk crossing the huge road between the transfer ramp & the uni.

I do have thoughts in words, language. I don’t exactly hear or see it but it’s definitely language based. Often two levels of thought, one superficial and another underneath, thinking about those superficial thoughts.

That whole room is horrifying. Is your dad a sea witch?

Oh this is going to sound like my mind is in the gutter, but there have been a couple of NSFW collaborations between smut posters who met on the NSFW then made some posts together. I find that just delightful.

If we can stop things ending up in the Gulf, instead of polluting it -

Stop fertilizer runoff and disappear oil rigs, move all hotels back from the beach by a quarter mile or so.

If that option is unavailable, Ron Desantis, Rick Scott, Ashley Moody and Beth Bondi, Citizens United, and the gerrymandered voting district maps.

Dishonorable Devin Dreeshen.

I use plastic produce bags to cover rising sourdough.

Always use the peels of the pineapple to make tepache!

I looked at my paycheck (US) vs. one of our Swedish colleagues when I was doing our payroll, and yes, the tax was about 45%, my federal withholding is much less but once you add in the deductions for 401k (unsecured pension scheme) and health insurance (that doesn’t cover anything except annual wellness until we pay in 8,000 USD) and social security (the fed pension being paid now to old people, and their healthcare) my deductions also leave about 55% of my pay for net pay.

The part I object to most in terms of cost here is the healthcare - my deductions may mirror the Swede but I don’t think they also have to cover the first 8k of cost out of pocket.

(Edit - it was Sweden not Denmark)