Huh. I'm a bit north of that region, and only feed hummingbirds (of which I've had WAAAAAY more this year than usual), and just leave the songbirds to forage the vegetables and flowers. But I *seem* to have lots of them and certainly haven't seen any sick or dead ones. Hope they figure it out.

re prisoners dilemma inside an Infinity War scenario Wow, hadn't heard that. Thing is, if there really were a Thanos figure looking to adjust population to fit global resources / climate capacity by simply killing them off... he could do it that way, OR he could wait until half the world were vaccinated and then unleash a fast-spreading variant (call it: Delta) to finish off the unvaccinated. The Q-predicted way, the Sheeple get snapped, the other way (call it: science) the Resisters get polished off by natural-looking causes. Which type would Thanos prefer in a world he controlled? Once you posit a Thanos figure as both real, and a counterforce to the power of Q, it seems to me that the Choose Your Adventure decision tree shifts rather dramatically.

re classroom teaching that "causes distress" (language from the PA bill) That is a clear object lesson in how *simple coverage of factually historical events* is quite likely to "cause distress" in some students. From the WaPo, events right in Loudon County itself: [That incident took place 12 years ago. Not Jim Crow or the turbulent 1970s. The Obama administration.] On a straight line with And And moving into the I Have a Dream era It is easy to imagine that simple coverage of "just the facts m'am" might "cause distress" in some students. Those facts are, in fact, distressing. Covering those facts might also make some students "angry." Although it looks like there already is an anger issue: Grappling with difficult bits of the past is hard. For some reason I'm connecting this difficulty with the Family Secrets thread. We've already tried, for decades, to paper over slave auctions and Black Codes and Tulsa massacres and towns filling up municipal pools rather than integrate them. Right this moment we're studiously ignoring how charter schools have re-segregated education and how race-differential law enforcement plunders families and prison labor re-constitutes near-slavery in (yet) another form. We've already tried to declare ourselves into Colorblind conditions. In the Family Secrets thread, we have a lot of discussion about how folks have a right to know their histories. How keeping secrets is corrosive to individuals and families. How important it is to face the truth, even when it's painful. Is that dynamic somehow different, for whole societies?

re once Pandora's Box has been opened, there's no going back Absolutely. We are where we are. In this country, we've basically given up on the concept of privacy, both culturally and legally. Other nations have tried and are continuing to try to draw different lines. (For example, around the use of genealogy database information by law enforcement, or the open monetization of personal information without the consent of those in the system.) But there is no going back, only finding ways to navigate within the new set of incentives that now really do exist, as individuals facing dilemmas like the OP's, as more distant bystanders, and as a society. (On the second of those issues -- it is fascinating to me, that a database that was initially built over YEARS, by tens of thousand of hours of painstaking labor, mostly by LDS women volunteers, for an entirely different purpose, is now the foundation on which several billion-dollar businesses rest. Not quite sure where to go with that thought, but it is incongruous to me.)

re the unintended consequences of adverse incentives Sure. Individual choice. I agree. And yet, in the aggregate, the combined effects of DNA enthusiasm and Pandora curiosity (including the idea you expressed, that we each have a "right" to "knowledge") creates a new set of incentive structures that ups the risks/costs to women with unplanned pregnancies. Particularly in the cases of pregnancies causes by rape, where the risk is not merely that a long held "secret" could be unilaterally unveiled decades later and disrupt relationships in marriage/later children, but that a deep and painful trauma could be unilaterally unveiled decades later. In the aggregate, the distance we've driven, as a society, away from the concept of "privacy" and towards DNA typing and prurience has created a system of consequences that tilts more toward abortion. That's on US, all of the cogs in the enormous wheel that collectively comprise the system. I fully appreciate that that is totally-not what the formidable resources that LDS has built, for entirely different reasons, to facilitate ancestry.com ever intended. Unintended. Nonetheless: consequences. Which I do put on *us*, every one of us who contributed to that effort or to those databases or to the wide range of business models that support those databases. YMMV. I don't discount, at all, the longing of people who were adopted to trace their origins or understand their genetic medical records or connect with biological relatives if they are able. I do see real tension between that valid interest, versus the longing of (some, not all) birth mothers to put painful trauma behind them. It's a tradeoff. The "humanity" does not heap up all on one side between those dueling legitimate interests. (And I'm substantially less sympathetic to the interest of extended family members several degrees removed from adoption... the further the connection from straight genetic line, the less it looks like a matter of medical information and the more it looks like sheer prurience. I don't see "humanity" as enabling gossip or prurience by distant relatives over the real pain of the principals.)

In combination, these two posts lay out a real risk, and the unintended consequence that the Glorious Potential of DNA testing/Ancestry.com combined lead to a real effect: that young women impregnated by rape are more likely to choose abortion over adoption, out of well-founded fear that they'll be dragged back to their trauma decades later by Pandora's Box curiosity. I KNOW that's not what the LDS and other geneology enthusiasts, or advocates of family transparency, intend. But that's literally what the Pandora's Box story is about.

That is a GREAT list. Something for everyone, however you approach what commemoration is about. I don't think my 18 yo has ever seen Forrest Gump, which I put in my top 20 of all time, so I think I'll propose that one, if we have any time or oomph left after the 4p BBQ we're headed to. And *strongly* endorse Hidden Figures to anyone who hasn't seen it.

Holding her and her family. And you.

For me, not at all. Experiment = ex/rhymes with hex - pare/rhymes with care - uh/rhymes with duh - ment/rhymes with sent; emphasis on PARE Experience = ex/rhymes with hex - peer/rhymes with leer - ee/rhymes with see - ence/rhymes with fence; emphasis on PEER I puffy heart love how much language varies across regions.

Another voice defending NJ, LOL. We lived there (northern part) for 7 years and had our first two kids there. Solid sense of civic participation, good schools, wide range of faith organizations, nice housing with a good amount of space. There are now good train links to NYC (this only was completed after we sold our house, sigh) so easy access to all the CULTCHA. Considerably lower COLA than the Westchester/CT side of New York, and the beaches are, truly, soooooo much better than the stooopid Long Island Sound nonsense we have here. It's called the GARDEN STATE for reasons, people. Don't judge it from the vantage point of I-95. Get off the highway and take an actual look.

This is closest to how I say it, but I do a schwa on the i: ex-pare-uh-ment. If it had an accent mark, the accent would go on PARE.

I love where I live. Homeschooling is easy, lots of strong public and private schools, access to tons of museums / theater / music in both the New Haven and NYC directions, lots of outdoors stuff, strong civic traditions. Cost of living is unconscionable, however.

My 18 yo recently renewed hers (technically "got a new one" I guess, as the old had actually expired in the time of COVID). The guy said to expect 3+ months and was surprised we didn't pay to expedite (why bother, we're still not going anywhere anytime soon). It *actually* arrived within 6 weeks, even without paying to expedite. So hopefully they're managing expectations but moving faster than the warnings?

Great Divorce is the Lewis book I most appreciate (Til We Have Faces and Screwtape are the runners up).

Awww, you're moving to the next stage!! We have often just used Staples to reproduce my kid's paintings -- their scanner goes up to maybe ~18 x 30? Pretty big. And a wide range of paper options -- you wouldn't want to print watercolor on flat glossy paper, it wouldn't look right. We've found over the years that some of the staff who work in the reproduction/ graphics department are much better than others at getting the colors matched right. It's not just a matter of straight copying, they have (limited, but useful) tools to adjust the toner levels. I used to carry the card of one particularly good colorist, and call ahead to find out when she'd be there. And doing it that way works out to maybe ~$1-2 a copy, less if you can arrange multiple small pieces onto a single big sheet and then trim with a paper cutter. The quality is fine if you're aiming for fine. For bigger pieces, or times when she needs portfolio-quality reproductions, we go to a local art guild that has a YUGE and very high-resolution scanner. She's got relationships there -- I don't know that it's a regular service they just provide for walk-ins. Or -- you're a photographer -- the other way to do it is to do what she needs to do for pieces on stretched canvas that won't fit in a scanner. You hang the piece, light it with diffused light, take a very high res photo, trim the photo, and then (upload your portfolio piece onto Slideroom or your iPad portolio or whatever, or) print it on a high-res printer (Staples is FINE for this) onto whatever paper makes sense.

re discrepancy between born-male v born-female rates Of course not. How do you understand/attribute/hypothesize the discrepancy between born-males and born-females?

Wow, that (quite recent) discrepancy between the born-female vs the born-male rate is STRIKING. 3 to one and it looks from the graph (?) like the gap continues to widen even as the absolute numbers (particularly for the born-males) may be leveling off.

Oh dear. Holding her and her kids in the light.

Most. Tiresome. Eternal. Truth. Ever: Honestly, what is UP with this???!!

re wider/bigger bucket of more fluid/asexual/androgynous range giving kids more room I'm not musing about "giving out options" or telling young people they belong to some specific category" so much as dialing back the social/cultural expectations side of things (that I myself think of as "gender expectations/roles," but recognize that others on the thread don't embrace that particular language). That if there were less calcified expectations about what folks wear, makeup/manicures/hair, career & compensation, expectations about behavior in bed, roles/expectations within household... all the stuff that *doesn't* directly tie to body parts... kids might have more space. I do think that those expectations have actually hardened, not become more flexible, since the 70s. Maybe it's porn, maybe it's backlash against feminism, I dunno. When I was in high school (Dorothy Hamill days), *lots* of girls had short hair. (Today, on the East Coast at least, it is signalling.) *Lots* of kids wore jeans, chinos, sweaters, Bean boots in bad winter, Converse in good weather. Cut & sized for the female v male body, but the styles were quite similar. (Today, here, that kind of garb is signalling.) In college *lots* of women opted out of makeup, shaving, tight or restrictive clothing. Not all women, or not every day... but it wasn't a statement one way or another. Superficial stuff perhaps, compared to pay equity and unreciprocal sex. But visible and apparent in a way that the Longer Term is not.

re the Sheer Numbers of kids experiencing ~~some form~~ of dysphoria, and whether that has always been true in prior generations (I do think gender stereotypes have hardened since the time I was coming of age. As well, in those days there was also a real conversation about women's capacity for, and right to, pleasure in bed, a conversation / notion which maybe was never fully shared across all segments of society; but which in any event seems to have largely receded. All three of my kids report some pretty unreciprocal expectations in that regard, which perhaps do reflect greater porn use... need to think about that some more. But if part of the stereotyped social expectations, for conservative wives as surely as for Sex in the City singles, amounts to a sort of resigned ya do whatcher man wants you to do... I can see how that might, er, curb their enthusiasm for the whole undertaking.) To your second factor, though: are you suggesting that the *subjective experience* of young people not-liking or not-comfortable-in or longing-to-opt-out has always been... quite common, and what is different today is the language of "dysphoria" and the cultural wrap around to it? That it's not so much that the real incidence of such subjective experience, as a wider range of options and acceptance? If that is the case, then if kids could wade in a wider/bigger bucket of more fluid/asexual/androgynous range -- rather than fast-track to bodily changes, I mean -- would, I would think, HELP over time. re assurances from grownups, and how they land to adolescents This is hard, because (I know from hard-won experience as both a onetime hard-to-parent kid, and also as a parent to a hard-to-parent kid, that...) some kids can't hear that "This Too Shall Pass" message from parents. Not "won't." Can't.

Y'all, folks. Y'all. It is a glorious, wondrous, all-purpose, grammatically perfect construction. I say this as a person whose entire US-based geography has only ever extended, over nearly 6 decades, between northern NJ and northern NY state.

re bodily alteration to feel "normal" in a prior age, had the option been available Just to clarify this: in your case, the body-shaping direction you would have availed of, had the option been available to you, would have been hormonal treatment/surgery to enable you to present as *more female* rather than more male or androgynous?

re fact-based population averages... vs social expectations-driven stereotypes Nine pages in, and I'm truly flummoxed how anyone can argue that BOTH of these are real. Yes, uterus and menstruation and breastfeeding exist, stemming directly from sex organs; as do population averages re height and shape, within which there are individuals who are very tall compared to the female average or very slight compared to the male. Some individuals never bear children, whether by choice or circumstance or infertility, and thus never experience the biological experiences of pregnancy or breastfeeding. Yes, culture-based expectations exist on roles and looks and behavior. Some individuals are fully comfortable within those expectations, other individuals chafe at specific *aspects or limitations* of those expectations-- clothing/makeup/manicures, how women are expected to behave in bed, career, compensation, roles within household/family -- of some of those expectations (FWIW, that's where I land personally). Other individuals really experience a pretty deep revulsion against the entire package. I feel like that much is directly verifiable, empirically? There ARE averages that can be measured. There ARE individuals whose testimony about their own personal struggles against social expectations/limitations we have heard right on this thread. ______ So nine pages in, I am discerning two issues that are more subjective or exploratory. Whether "gender" is useful language to convey that bucket of cultural/social expectations that do not derive directly from sex organs; and Whether individuals who experience a pretty deep revulsion against that whole package of cultural/social expectations (clothing/makeup/manicures, how women are expected to behave in bed, career, compensation, roles within household/family) are, in this moment, processing that into a determination to reshape their physical bodies rather than try to reshape societal expectations. Nine pages in, I don't think (?) that any of us who've pushed back on the language of "gender" to label ~~clothing/makeup/manicures, how women are expected to behave in bed, career, compensation, roles within household/family~~ deny that such social and cultural expectations do exist. Only that "gender" as a word isn't useful, or the correct terminology, to describe that bucket of stuff. Is that correct? I'm much more interested in the second question. I have been frankly astonished, over the last five years, at *how many* young people experience ~~some version~~ of dysphoria. The sheer numbers. Unless there's some explanation for what is different, in this moment, that is causal to that distress... it suggests that a STAGGERING NUMBER of people must have felt a staggering weight of un-languaged in-actionable distress in all prior generations. Which perhaps is true.

I'm not quite following what the back story has to do with the front story. You're not staying with aunt, but with grandma? So the issue amounts to you'll be traipsing through the common entry? If anything the driving-grandma-around duties will be *less* when you're there? Anyway, concur with pp - just give both of them a couple of dates that work for you, and see if one works better than the other for the both of them.