My dh had covid just last week. The guidelines say to isolate for 5 days and only come out if symptoms improve. Well, my dh’s symptoms sort of improved insofar as some of them got better, but he still had debilitating fatigue. I was like, “Dude! You are still feeling sick as a dog! Your symptoms have not “improved” enough for you to come out of isolation. They don’t mean, ‘Some of your symptoms went away, but you still feel sick as a dog, so come on out and hang out with the family!’” I made him stay isolated for another 5 days. On day 9, he woke up feeling really good. That is the day I say that his symptoms improved. He finally had energy and wasn’t falling asleep every other minute. So, yeah, 54 year old middle-aged men aren’t going to be the same as 20-something college students. We already knew that the younger set has milder symptoms.

Not to be a contrarian, but are those older movies (anything made before 1990, still culturally relevant to the younger generations? I’m meaning, have movies before 1990 shaped their culture and are there still significant references to the movies or do people still quote them? E.T. and John Hughes movies were big when I was growing up, but were they big for anyone born after 2000? Does anyone under 45 reference E.T. or Pretty in Pink regularly? I’ve thought about this a lot, because I’ve been showing my son movies that I see as “important movies” but I’m realizing that a lot of the phrases that were famous are no longer famous. For example, just last month we watched Casablanca. My dh and I were like, “This is where all those famous lines are from like, ‘Here’s looking at you, kid’”. My ds 19 and 17 both had never heard that line. “Ok, how about ‘Play it again, Sam’ (which isn’t even the real line)?” Nope. they’d never heard of it. “This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship?” Nope. “Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life?” Crickets. They didn’t recognize a single line from that movie, and yet many people my age and older would have (probably) recognized them. But you don’t find references to Casablanca anymore. (Note, I watched When Harry Met Sally the other day and they referenced Casablanca, but that movie came out in the 90s.) I’m not sure that the very old movies are referenced anymore. Time marches on, you know? My best friend had posters of Humphrey Bogart in her dorm room in college, but they don’t sell Humphrey Bogart posters anymore. And John Hughes’ movies (Breakfast Club, etc.) are NOT what it’s like to be a teenager now, if they ever were what it was like to be a teenager. My kids think those movies are pretty awful and clearly see all the racism, misogyny, etc, that we didn’t see back then. They don’t see the antics in the movie as realistic or relatable at all. Wizard of Oz is maybe still relevant because little kids watch it, but maybe not. They don’t really sell all the knick knacks and posters of WoO the way they used to when I was growing up, so it’s not like people are out buying Wizard of Oz snowglobes they way they did in the 80s. You can share the movies you enjoyed as a kid, but I’m not sure they’re still relevant today, especially movies like Gone with the Wind or Citizen Kane. Maybe some later ones…maybe. I’d agree with Star Wars, but only because it’s still a big thing. Probably those Marvel movies. Those are the movies of the current generation that are shaping culture (though I’m sick to death of them.) Maybe Napolean Dynamite? It was after the 2000s and had a pretty big cultural impact, and that movie is still probably quoted by the younger set (anyone under 45), so your kids might be interested in knowing where those quote come from. LoTR is something that will still be referenced for a while, so they ought to see those. Check out this list of movies that shaped Millennials: https://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/2015/12/50_movies_that_shaped_the_mill.html Here’s a list of the favorite movies for 13-37 years olds. And lo and behold, Gone with the Wind is on there! I stand corrected. https://www.ypulse.com/article/2019/10/29/a-new-movie-has-taken-over-as-gen-z-millennials-favorite-of-all-time/ If I was going to create a list, I’d pick movies from that second link.

Oh—And my dh would get upset when I would talk about it, but that’s because from his POV it wasn’t a big deal. He had NO idea how much he was doing it, because he couldn’t remember. To him, it was only a couple of times that he forgot, so why was I being so over-the-top about it? The more I talked about it, the more hardened he got because he really felt like I was just picking on him for no good reason. From his POV, he was listening to me. But…he didn’t realize that he was immediately forgetting what I said the majority of the time (almost all of the time at the end.). So, all he knew is that he listened and then I still got mad, because he didn’t realize all the times he was forgetting. You could try keeping track of it if you think he needs that bump to make him take it seriously as a possible medical issue. Maybe with actual figures he might understand why you keep mentioning it. My dh is the sort that wouldn’t do well if I presented him with a list of times, dates, incidents, but my dh has self-esteem issues and would have thought it was just me picking on him even more. He would have felt attacked, even though I was just trying to help him. Anyway, it took my dh realizing his coworkers were complaining, and falling asleep at a red light, for him to get scared enough on his own to take action.

The reason you’re pointing it out (I just read the reply above mine), is that it’s not normal. Tell him that when someone close to you realizes something not normal is going on, they’re not telling you to shame you. They’re telling you to help you. Tell him that you’ve researched a bit and realized this could be related to sleep. Ask him to get a sleep test because if this keeps up, he is headed to early Alzheimer's. The less sleep you get, the more likely you’ll have dementia/Alzheimer's when you’re older. It’s strongly linked.

DIdn’t read all the replies because I’m supposed to be doing other things and not hanging out on social media, but after reading the first 10 or so replies: My dh used to do this. It got worse and worse. He couldn’t remember what I said, and he didn’t even remember that we’d talked at all. So if I said, “We were in the kitchen and I had just dropped that pot and I said, “Blah blah””, he couldn’t even remember that we’d been in the kitchen at all with a dropped pot. I had gone through first feeling very hurt that nothing I said mattered to him. Then angry that nothing I said mattered to him. Then scared that he might be going through early dementia in his 40s. He didn’t believe me about how bad it was and so I just shut down and didn’t talk to him pretty much ever. Not in a mean way, but because he simply didn’t remember anything I said, so it was pointless to talk. Finally, it dawned on him that he was forgetting things at work. And one day, he fell asleep waiting for a light to turn green. It was then that he FINALLY took his snoring seriously and had a sleep test done. He had sleep apnea. He got a cpap and the memory issues went away within a couple of weeks. Now…he’s a man with ADHD, so he still misses things I say, but it’s a “normal” amount for a man with ADHD. (Sorry men with adhd, you guys are notorious for not hearing your wives.) It was back to an amount that was slightly irritating, but not deeply hurtful like it had been getting. So, all I can say to you is see if it’s sleep issues. Sleep issues are very strongly related to memory issues and if he can’t even keep his short-term memories, he needs help.

I saw Dr Strange at the drive-in theater with my son. By about 2/3 of the way through, we were openly mocking the movie. Thankfully, no one else could hear us in our car. I didn’t like it at all, but I also didn’t expect to. I only went to see Dr. Strange because we wanted to see the 2nd movie (drive in is a 2-fer.) (The second movie was Morbius which most people didn’t like, but my son and I found it to be much better than the stink-fest that was Dr. Strange.) Once a character has unlimited power to change reality, the movie no longer has anything to do with story and is all about CGI. I find movies like that boring. I haven’t enjoyed most of the recent marvel movies because it’s all just a CGI-fest. At the point when that single harp note flew through the air and did…I don’t even know what…what were those stupid notes even doing?….I rolled my eyes so hard they fell out of my head and I had to dust the lint off and put them back in. I was like, “Wait…is that harp going to produce a note and it’ll be all poignant or something??” and it was and my son burst out laughing. I could go on a rant about it, but I’ve done my best to drive everything about it from my memory because it was a huge waste of time. But it was just dumb. Nothing made much sense if you thought about it for more than 2 seconds. I hear they did a bad job of editing and that’s probably why it seemed so very bad to me. It was a hot mess of a movie.

Our local SPCA makes you buy a tshirt with a logo and it’s required that you wear it if you’re volunteering with the animals.

It didn’t help that it was this particular Doctor Who costume. The costumer designer created it as a joke, but the director didn’t understand it was a joke and loved it. The director made the actor wear it, and that particular actor is a bit of a curmudgeon and hated the costume. It’s literally a clown costume. People don’t really treat you with respect when you wear your clown costume. Poor kid. I wish we could all get away with wearing stuff like this whenever we want to.

In his early to mid teens, my son wore his Doctor Who cosplay costume to his weekly church youth group. I explained to him that he could wear what he wants, and that some kids will be cool with it, but others will feel that it’s too unique and since a lot of teens want to feel like they “belong” they will be uncomfortable hanging out with someone who doesn’t look like the rest of the group. I told him that humans are social and they like to feel part of the group and like to look alike in their groups. Anyone who looks different might be rejected, either overtly or subtly. He wore his costume and told me I was wrong and that lots of kids came up to him and said they liked it. He would also wear sloppy clothes when he wasn’t wearing his cosplay outfit and just didn’t care what anyone thought. He continued with his sloppy clothes and costumes for a couple of years. Ok. FIne. And then a few years later, he started dressing with a bit more care; he didn’t let himself wear completely sloppy clothes. He wears simple jeans and tee-shirts that fit nicely. Not high-fashion, but nice. One day he told me that while everyone was nice enough to him when he’d wear his costumes or whatever sloppy clothes he felt like, he started to realize that no one listened to him. He realized he didn’t have any respect. He was just the goofy kid that they weren’t actively mean to, but they dismissed as unimportant. He realized that if he wanted to garner respect and have a voice, he’d have to conform, just a little bit. It was a hard lesson, but he learned it. I did tell him the truth to begin with, explaining that humans make assumptions based on clothing and they are uncomfortable around someone who doesn’t look like the others, but then I let it go and let him wear what he wanted, and the world taught him the lesson for me. I wish the world wasn’t this way with all my heart, but it is. I wish he could have kept wearing his costumes without any negative outcomes, but that’s just not the way people are wired. At least not around here.

I went there and hated it.

Right—that’s why I wondered if it was my own personal slowness to mature or if it was more universal and had to do with aging, because it wasn’t until I was in my 40s that I realized all of what I wrote (I’m 49 now). It was after 40 that I purposely pursued 2 women’s friendships because they were able to handle my most raw and real thoughts/feelings. The other friends would have sort of handled it on the surface, but deep down they wouldn’t be able to handle the real me and I think they would have felt out of their depth talking about it too much. My mom-friends are the ones that I thought I had the deep friendships with, but now realize aren’t as deep as I thought, though they’re still awesome women and I enjoy my time with them. There’s just that last step to the inner sanctum that I can’t quite take with them. They’re still sanctum, but are outer sanctum. So, I wonder if a lot of people feel that way once they’re in their 40s? Or maybe I was just slow to mature, and everyone else sorts this out much earlier than I did.

My dh has something that was just posted in another thread today: Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria https://www.betterhelp.com/advice/adhd/are-your-anxiety-and-depression-caused-by-rejection-sensitive-dysphoria/ This means he is prone to interpreting benign comments as rejection or criticism, even if they’re not directed at him. So, it makes conversations about my real, raw, messy, human emotions difficult. He tends to misinterpret my emotions as somehow him being at fault or…something. I don’t know what exactly, but he cannot handle me when I’m being my most real. So, I can’t really vent to him about my most vulnerable feelings or it just gets weird and we end up feeling estranged for no good reason. I have cultivated a few women friendships that I can be my most raw in front of. Maybe 3 or 4 of them. I agree with Mrs. Tiggywinkle. I used to think I could tell my friends anything, but as life progressed, I realized that there are only a few that I can *really* tell anything. I wonder if those millennials will also have that revelation later in life. I also thought I was being real with my friends when I was younger, but when I look back, I can see that the friendships were still a bit shallow, though I thought they were deeper. Of course, maybe that’s just me and I took longer to mature or something. @Quill Years ago you floated the idea of offering a service where a person could just talk to you about anything they want to talk about and you’d just listen. You wouldn’t be a counselor or give advice, but you’d be a person that someone could talk at and feel heard and vent and get things off their chests. (Sort of like we all do when we come on here and vent.) I’ve sometimes thought of contacting you and see if you’d really offer that service for in-person talking/venting.

Maybe you just don’t need to do anything for the next …year? I’m mostly serious about this. Maybe it’s time to “turn your clothes hangers around.” Every year, I turn all my clothes hangers the other way around. When I wear something, I put it back in the closet the right way. After a year, anything that didn’t get worn, gets donated. I can tell it didn’t get worn, because the hanger is backwards. Maybe it’s time to turn all the clothes hangers around on that (overwhelming and exhausting) list of things you do. Don’t require yourself to do any of them: no lists, no goals. And then wait and see which activities you actually bother doing over the next year. It’s your life. You can do whatever you want with it. If you want to hang out on the boards for the next 6 months, then hang out. Let things unfold as they will, rather than forcing a decision. It’s ok to be a human being, and not a human doing, for a while.

I remember buying my first stash of cleaning supplies when I got married: broom, dustpan, toilet cleanser. I just about fell over at the checkout counter! $$$$!

I love what we wrote before! My caveats before were that once we’d helped with college, then we’d go out to eat every night. I’m stuck in a bit of limbo now. I have the job, but I set aside more than half of it for college costs, and then a sizable hunk for my own retirement savings, and so we have a bit of money left over at the end to spend on Other Things, but it’s not like I have as much as I’d thought, because so much of it is set aside for college. Not complaining! I am eternally grateful that I have the chance to set so much aside for college because we simply were not able to save anything for the boys until I got that job, so they’d have had to foot the bill entirely on their own. Going out to eat more often is certainly one of those Other Things I use the leftover salary for, but we’re not up to nightly yet, because we set the majority of my salary aside. At this point, our meals are somewhat like yours. We always have pasta on Monday, Taco Tuesday, etc. so everyone knows what to expect if we’re not eating out and somewhat alleviates that “What’s for dinner” question. And I made sure to teach the boys how to cook the nightly planned meals. Like, they know how to cook their own pasta on pasta Monday. They know how to make the tacos on Taco Tuesday, etc. So, when I’m working late, which I do a lot, I can tell them, “Get dinner going” and they can. Now that they can cook dinner for themselves most of the time, they don’t ask as much about it. Funny how that works…

Yes! I’ve almost cried a few times at the frustration from all the noise. Our tiny little houses are close together so there is nowhere in my house I can escape the noise. Nowhere. My dh didn’t quite get it until he started working from home, and I swear he, too, almost cried the first week he had to listen to it while trying to work. The leaf blower is the worst, because it’s not a steady noise. It’s constantly being powered up and down…rrrrRRRRRrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRrrrrRRRRrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRR. I can almost block out the steady noises, but when it’s unevenly oscillating I just can’t block it out.

We don’t have a forested lane anywhere near our house, or I would have thought you were talking about my neighbor. People think I’m joking when I say he’s out 3-4 times a week and spends 3-5 hours with his motor tools, but I’m not exaggerating at all. I don’t know how he’s not stone deaf at this point. His machines drone and drone and drone for soooo long for so much of the week. I feel your pain.

My old bedroom (now my son’s) has two cream walls and two blue walls. I started painting when they were small, got sidetracked, and now it’s like I don’t even see that the room has two colors in it. It’s been about 14 or so years. Maybe when he moves out I’ll get around to painting it all one color…

I loved Christian Light Education’s grammar for my kids. It’s a rock solid curriculum that will certainly teach your kids practical applications. I myself learned a lot from it.

Congratulations and thank you for this post! My son who sounds like yours is in college and sometimes I wonder if he should be because it’s so hard for him to juggle with his ADD. And yet he’s so good at math that I can’t picture him doing anything else (he’s a math major). It’s so much harder for these kids and so the successes are all the sweeter.

My husband works at a community college. Depending on the level of your job, the employees get differing benefits for tuition reduction. At my husband’s level, his immediately family all has free tuition, but we pay fees/books. The tuition is paid by the college up front. I actually can’t remember if it’s based on grade or not as to whether you can keep the free tuition. My son gets A’s, so we haven’t had to think about it. My sons will both start at the community college and then transfer out to a college that accepts all the credits.

I’ve been wondering too, if they were out of communication about the 911 calls and didn’t realize there were still children alive in the room. Not looking for excuses for them because that’s just another horrible mistake in a long line of mistakes (if they were out of communication with 911). I’m just wondering if that’s what happened.

Get that Shingles medicine asap, and get the vaccine asap. I turn 50 this year and I will be getting that vaccine on my birthday as my birthday present to myself. You’re overdue if you over 50!

Oh, and to add to my own post: After 19 years out of the workforce, I got a job as a technical writer at a health insurance company, and the lessons I learned along with my kids using CLE grammar have been critical to my success at writing on the job.

I loved CLE for my kids. We discovered it when my kids were in 3rd grade, so I can’t personally attest to the 1st grade curric, but we loved it from 3rd grade on. Here’s a link to a sample of some of what they teach in first grade. There is very little (doesn’t look like any) sentence writing. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/prod-clp-files/public/documents/3360/original/Language_Arts_101.pdf Here’s a link to the curric for purchase: https://christianlight.org/curriculum/by-grade/grade-1/language-arts For the later years, the teacher’s guide is very helpful when checking work. Not sure you need it for 1st grade. If you don’t know anything about it, CLE (Christian Light Education) is set up so that there are 10 workbooks that the student uses throughout the year. My kids liked it because they didn’t have a giant book to work through, and they got a sense of accomplishment 10 times throughout the year. My oldest is 19 and the youngest is 17 and they have excellent grammar now. 🙂