u/King_Turduckin

as the title says, i will take all the advice I can, it smells like expired bumblebee tuna.

I'm taking my 15 year old daughter to NYC in November for her birthday. The plan is to see a Hamilton matinee and eat good steak. We're coming up from DC; I lived in NYC 25 years ago but have fallen completely out of touch with the steakhouse scene.

I know "what steaks are good" posts are common, but I'm trying to find good steak with a very specific vibe:

My daughter isn't going to care about the name on the door, the skill of the mixologist, or whether the pastry chef is a James Beard nominee. She doesn't need to know the name of the farm the cow came from. She's not going to be impressed by the artisnal cheese. She's DEFINITELY not going to want to dress up super fancy -- needs to be a place she can go in wearing a basic theater dress and a pair of chuck taylors. This is about a great cut of beef well prepared to the proper temperature, ideally in an unpretentious environment. And I need to be able to actually get a table for four on a Saturday night.

We're staying near Penn Station, but I'm comfortable heading anywhere in the city for the right place. Price not really a factor if the food justifies it, but not looking for expensive just for the sake of expensive. There are so many steak options in mid-town, but they all seem to be very not the vibe I hope to find -- either overly pretentious or tourist traps -- I'm struggling to find one she's going to like (even if all she says after the meal is "yeah, the steak was fine. Whatever. It's just steak Dad.")

Thanks for any suggestions and downvote away.

Peter Chang is good authentic Chinese food, but I don't want authentic. I want American style served out of the boxes with the metal bar across the top: wonton soup, egg rolls, bright red spare ribs and roast pork, combination lo mein, cashew chicken, crispy sesame beef, etc.

There used to be a great place on Old Dominion (New Star Asian Bistro), but they closed years ago and I feel like I've been disappointed by every place on Langston or Washington or Wilson. I've got to be missing something, right? There's 14 great neighborhood Thai restaurants and no great Chinese.

I took the Wegovy pill for about six months, lost 30 lbs, but shortly after going to the highest dose developed what I can only describe as a full body sunburn feeling. Details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/WegovyPillWeightLoss/s/K2ssfXljfe

It has completely scared me off Wegovy, but I have more weight to lose. My doctor is recommending Foundayo. I searched this sub and found no reports of skin sensation problems, but maybe I missed them. Has anyone experienced anything similar to this? If not I might make the switch.

I'm 17 months post treatment / 16 months confirmed NED after T2n1m0 HPV+ tonsil SCC. In the last month I've gotten the joy of a negative PET and a negative NavDX test. Yet I'm still struggling with anxiety about recurrence, which intellectually I know shouldn't be a thing. Has anyone else continued to experience anxiety this far out? Did it get better from here?

Intellectually I've gotten about this far with it: I was living my life without cancer. Hadn't ever really worried about cancer. Then one day, out of the blue, cancer. From diagnosis through treatment to the PET scan saying it was gone was just about exactly four months -- I did an absolute speed run of the thing through chemo and surgery. There was this frenetic all-consuming fairly awful period full of worry, needles, side effects, pain and fear. Fear that I didn't let myself fully process as a natural defense mechanism, because my brain was too busy being consumed with the fight itself. I was worried about today and not tomorrow, because today was plenty hard and fight was the only choice, no flight available.

Then, just as quick as it started, it was over. But it wasn't. The physical after effects healed, but the trauma was hiding. Except I didn't know the trauma was a thing, because all the doctors focused on the physical and not a single one said "by the way, you're going to beat the physical side of this disease quickly, but the emotional scars are going to last the longest."

I think it's that you can't just switch the body and mind into intense fight mode against a single adversary and then turn it off because you know the adversary is gone. We're not wired that way as a species. A million years ago a guy who spent a day getting chased by a bear decided it was safe to sleep and got eaten, while his buddy kept running and became an ancestor to us all. Fear of danger is visceral, primal, and for good reason.

Here, the danger was as real as a bear. But my doctors killed the bear. Poisoned it then cut it into tiny slices on a biopsy slide. But in the same way we've evolved to sleep with an ear open for the next bear, my body is now hyper-vigilant for the return of the NEXT bear inside of me. Intellectually I know the bear is dead. The tests tell me so, without a shadow of a doubt. I know statistically there shouldn't be a new bear -- 98%+ of the time the new bear does not appear. So why won't my mind listen as I try to reason my way to not being so afraid of the next bear?

I feel like going through the day is going to be really hard for awhile, because bears don't just announce themselves from a safe distance. Fear of that is natural and normal and common, right? I feel like the trick is developing coping skills to not just say, but believe, "I know there are bears in the world. But I also know I killed the last one who showed up at my door, and statistically there's no reason to believe his friends are ever going to return. If they do, I'm going to kill them too."

So I've typed all that, but I still worry about the next bear. But a bit less than I did six months ago. And I'm going to keep working on it. I doubt I'm ever going to live a life fully free of fear of the next bear, but maybe that's a good thing -- staying vigilant enough (but not too much) will help me catch it and kill it if it comes back. The trick is finding that balance.

Have others found a way to enjoy the forest of life with reduced anxiety despite the potential for another bear encounter? How'd you do it? How long did it take?

I picked up a Chevy Blazer as a rental car today from one of the major car rental companies. It had barely more than 10 miles on the odometer -- I may have been the first person to rent it. It looked great, had that new car smell, figured it was my lucky day. Got on the freeway and was shocked at how underpowered it was -- it struggled to merge into freeway traffic. Then 25 miles down the highway, I saw a small cloud of white smoke behind me. First time I saw it, I thought it was a different car. Then a mile later i saw it again, definitely from me. Pulled over, and the left tail pipe was emitting very light but visible grey smoke, not condensation. The engine also seemed to be running slightly rough. Temperature was normal, no warning lights, no smell in the cabin, no smoke under the hood. Just the tailpipe emission. Called roadside assistance, they said drive it back and exchange it, which I did. I got another 2026 Blazer, and this one seemed to have a lot more power -- made me realize the first one definitely had an engine issue.

So, for this group, is this a known thing for these cars? Or did I just draw the very short straw and have the privilege of drawing a factory fresh lemon?

Hi all, I'm not a GTI guy, but my buddy in Maryland has a 2012 with under 40k miles that just had a rear window motor fail and also threw an Engine Power Control light. He's done with it, and is inclined to hand it off to CarMax, but to me their offer seems to be offensively low for what I'd always thought was a car with a cult following. Is there an enthusiast market for a fixer upper like this, or are his instincts right to just ditch it and make it their problem? If you had a similar car and wanted it out of your life, how would you go about trying to sell it?