u/lizardperson3

I got my ears pierced in 6th grade in the regular spot on my ear lobes, but for years I really wanted another set higher up on my lobe so I could wear 2 pairs of earrings at once but kept putting it off because I’m cheap. About a year ago I took my grandma to get her ears re-pierced and decided, what the hell, I’m finally gonna do it and get the piercings I’ve wanted for so long now. When I sat on the bench, the piercer looked at my ears and said I already have piercings there. She put a rod through and it went completely through. Totally healed healthy piercings. She said I would have had to go through the whole process of using saline solution and wearing jewelry in them for at least a couple months in order for them to be as established as they were. To this day I am still shocked, and loving my free mystery piercings.

-I have no previous photos of me with these piercings, and I looked back to pretty much all my photos back to when I was little

-I asked my friends and family, and nobody close to me has any memory of me getting these piercings. They were all equally puzzled.

-Some people I’ve mentioned this to have asked if I got them on a crazy night out and forgot. I’ve never been a big partier so this would be very very very out of character for me. I assume that even if this were the case I would have noticed the next morning, and the piercings would have closed up if ignored.

-In the weeks leading up to this ear-piercing day with my grandma, I was thinking more and more about how much I wanted this set of piercings and would occasionally look in the mirror and draw dots on my ears to plan out where I might want them pierced, and I definitely would have noticed the holes

-Any possible answer I can think of still doesn’t explain how these piercings are perfectly established, almost as if I had been longterm wearing earrings up until getting to the piercing shop.

hello! A couple weeks ago I applied to a Park Ranger 1 position at a state park on the Washington island I live on (And the application also applies to 2 nearby parks on neighboring islands)

I just heard back that they received a ton of applications and that I will likely hear back in the next 2 weeks on whether I will be referred for this position. I’m definitely more nervous to hear how many applications they received, but I do feel somewhat good about my chances being local to the island and having grown up visiting the park a lot. I also spent the last year doing ecological restoration work through Americorps so I have a good bit of experience working in the outdoors, supervising a crew, etc.

Would any state park rangers have some advice on what more prep I can do in the next couple weeks to make sure I have even better chances (if I do end up getting an interview)? My current plan is just to really study up on the park, as well as the other parks they may end up offering if I don’t get offered the one I’m local to. Also planning to visit the park as much as I can, try out any trails I haven’t done yet, read up on the history, maybe chat with some of the current rangers there!

The role did NOT require applicants to have a degree, which is a relief because I only have an associates degree in filmmaking. I’m hoping my work experience will suffice for what I don’t have academic experience in, as I’m sure most of the other applicants will have!

This is my dream job and the fact that this park is where I live is amazing (wouldn’t need to relocate, my husband loves his job and while we’re both willing to move it would be a dream come true if I could get this role here).

Any advice would be so appreciated!

I wanted to do flower confetti and ordered little sheer bags (like those drawstring jewelry bags) to keep the petals in so that guests can reuse the bag for their party favor (mini honey jars). However the amount of petals I ordered ended up not being quite enough, even if each person gets just a “shotglass” worth of petals in their little bag. we have about 165 guests but I was only able to fill about 125 bags of petals (and if I tried to spread it out more / have less petals in each bag then they would be looking pretty sparse).

To couples who have done individual confetti portions of any kind for their guests, did you find that every single person reached for one? or did it not really matter if someone didn’t get one? my fiancé insists that lots of people may not take one but I keep thinking what if a family with kids misses out on the flower confetti because I didn’t make enough bags? I’m trying to bulk it up with maple seed pods a.k.a. those whirlybird leaves, some lavender I had laying around; etc… but I definitely don’t have time to buy more pre-dried petals or buy smaller bags as the wedding is in 2 weeks. Thanks!

I wish so badly that I had made a point of adding a note to the RSVP page (we used Zola) that they NEED to input their emails when RSVPing. So many guests of mine didn’t, or just put their “spam account” emails as I’m sure they thought they’d just be getting a ton of junk mail from Zola, and now we have had to spend so much time tracking people down or texting them individually to give them important updates or find out their specific dietary restrictions. I also wish we had added a question on that page about dietary restrictions. It didn’t occur to me a year ago but now I’m scrambling to reach out to every guest who has ever mentioned a dietary restriction in passing to make sure we don’t accidentally have 0 food for them lol. Lesson learned!

Hello! I’m getting married in 1 month and thinking about how I’ll want my skin to look extra dewey, plump, and hydrated on the day of! I’ve never gotten a facial before and was curious about getting one a day or two before the wedding, but unless someone offers to get me one it’s a little out of my price range. Plus I live in a place with very limited spa options.

I would love some advice on extra things I can do for my skin in the week leading up to feel extra glowy! I’d love to give myself an at-home facial of sorts the night before or morning of, too. Not planning on wearing a ton of makeup, perhaps a tinted moisturizer and some concealer, so hoping to really bring out my natural glow.

For current skin context, my skin is pretty clear with the only spots being some old pigmentation from acne as a teen (I’m 29 now) but its not really noticeable. It feels soft and smooth, although sometimes looks a little dull. I also would love to get a handle on the sebaceous filaments on my nose and have been doing oil cleansing for a few weeks, but it isn’t really helping from what I’ve noticed. Could be that I’m not doing it right?

Other than that I cleanse, tone with witch hazel, apply an oil serum, moisturize (I have a morning and an evening one), and put on some eye cream and SPF. I exfoliate maybe twice a week, and I have a rose clay face mask that I definitely don’t use enough but really enjoy. Planning to start upping my water intake now too, and dialing back on alcohol, dairy, fried foods, etc..

I am not the world’s best sleeper, been this way all my life (have seen several doctors for it and am still this way) and not really banking on changing that in the next month, so I’m guessing my skin will look a little extra tired with all the planning stress in the final days and am hoping to combat that a bit too!

Thanks so much :))

hi! I (the bride) am pretty nervous to be posting this here as I know there’s bound to be critics, and I’m already feeling pretty self critical about it, but I’m taking the risk for the sake of potential encouragement or perspective.

Context is that I love to play music, and my fiancé and I have lots of friends who play music too, and it seemed fitting to have our wedding band be made up of our musical friends! We asked 4 friends if they would want to play a 45-minute set together, and they were all enthusiastic. One of my dearest friends will be the singer, she has an incredible voice, and she and I sat down together and made a list of songs we thought would be good. A couple of them are songs I really love to play, and with her encouragement we decided I will hop in on the set for a few songs at the end. There is one I will just be playing guitar for (while friend sings), and there’s one that I will be singing alongside my friend, and one more that I’ll play/sing with my mom (my mom and I love playing this specific song together and we thought it would be cute if the 2 of us sing while the other 4 just play instruments. Mom is enthusiastically on board too). For the rest of the set it is just the band playing and singing.

Is the bride performing at her own wedding too much? I feel a mix of excitement to play music with these friends who I love and have played fun shows with before, nervousness when I’m sure I’ll already be feeling nerves all day due to ceremony, and cringe-y self consciousness that I’ll seem like I’m trying to bring even more attention to myself when the day is already centered around my fiancé and I. I have gotten nothing but loving encouragement from my fiancé and our musical friends but I cant help but feel like some guests will judge. I know I shouldn’t really care but part of me does.

it’s a mid-day farm wedding in august, very DIY (I’m crafting all the decor), and fairly casual. Lots of kids lol. All-in-all the wedding is on the less traditional end of things. After the band there will be a DJ set for a couple hours.

Hello! Our wedding is in 2 months and I’m looking for advice on how to arrange music section of the afternoon.

We have both a band and a DJ. Our current plan is to put the band right after lunch/toasts, and have them start as people are getting their cake, and then DJ after. But not sure where to put our first dance. It’s a recorded song, so not one that we’d have the band play. Do we play the recorded first dance song before the band starts/when lunch is over, do our dance, and then the band plays? Or does the band play, then first dance, then DJ? Only concern with this second option is that I will want to dance with my partner during the band music, so that would kinda take away the first dance moment. I think the only reason I’m also concerned about option 1 is that the band music is not very high energy. Think summertime music festival of some local live band (Lol that’s the best description I’ve got, a lot of the songs are folksy indie songs)

I will definitely want to dance/sway with my partner, and I’m sure some others will too, but most people will just be sitting around chatting we imagine.…would it be weird to go from first dance (that I hope people will want to gather around for), to lower-energy live music (where we imagine a good portion of people may want to disperse a bit and chat), to higher energy DJ music?

I should also mention, the band is a group of dear friends, all very musically talented, who wanted to play for us. I helped them choose the setlist. These lower-energy songs just suited them more, and I’m super excited for them to play. Just puzzled on how to arrange the energy of the afternoon especially since it’s a daytime summer wedding with music being after lunch…we don’t want people getting too sleepy before the DJ starts! Obviously we have no idea what people will do..maybe they’ll be high energy all afternoon and dance through the band and DJ, or maybe they’ll leave after lunch to go nap! Who knows lol. We just want the flow of the day to feel good.

I [29F] feel like I always get defensive if someone is explaining something to me that I already know. Sometimes I’ll feel all impatient and snappy and say “I know!” and then I feel bad afterwards because I know how it makes me look and I know they were just trying to offer up their help and experience. The other day I was talking to a friend who knows I’m going back to school soon to finally get my bachelors degree, and she commented that I’m gonna need to get a masters degree too in order to find a job in the field I’ll be studying (which is more or less true) and I just got so tight-chested and annoyed and was like “Dude, I know, can you not?” (when I could have easily just said “Yeah, bummer” or something) and it just made me look like a total ass when I know that she wasn’t trying to be condescending.

She and I have talked about this, we had a really good conversation afterwards actually, but it’s still something I want to work on. My seasonal job just ended but this side of me came out with my coworker as well. He was my assistant but had had my role before and so knew a lot more than me about the specific roles of my position, and I felt like I was always on high-alert to defend my intelligence and experience whenever he was trying to be helpful and explain something simple.

This attitude feels like a waste of time and energy, and I would much rather be curious and open-minded so that maybe I can learn something new, but I just so easily get into these moods and then I kinda shut down afterwards and don’t feel like interacting with that person anymore. I got lunch with another friend the other day at an Indian spot she loves and she was so simply pointing out what was good on the menu and in my brain I was going “I KNOW, I’VE HAD INDIAN FOOD BEFORE AHHHH” and it was so hard to not actually say it aloud haha. For like an hour after lunch I was super internally resistant to everything she wanted to show me as she showed me around the town we were in, and outwardly I just looked bored and closed off. I can’t help but laugh at myself because it so silly. It makes me seem like a grumpy little kid.

In high school some friends made me feel really dumb and always commented that I always had my head in the clouds, and my theory is that for some reason that’s coming up stronger lately and making me want to prove my intelligence whenever someone explains the tiniest most harmless thing to me if I already know it.

Does anyone else experience the same thing? How do I keep my ego from getting in the way of what could otherwise be a productive and curious conversation? I’m usually really friendly and personable so I feel worried that I am becoming this weird defensive person.

My package has only been at customs for 3 days so barely any time at all but this is my first time purchasing something internationally and I keep reading all these horror stories about people hearing nothing for months once their package reaches a USPS facility. Mine seems to be in Jamaica NY. It’s my wedding dress for this August, I purchased it in December but for some reason the dressmaker didn’t send it until about a week ago, probably out of being busy. I guess I’m just looking for some reassurance, I had no idea customs could take weeks or months otherwise I would have requested the dressmaker send it sooner. Am I screwed if it takes longer than a week? Do I need to look for a backup wedding dress? Lol I’m a worrywort but this whole customs deal seems so freaky.

I have this friend who I’ve known for about 8 years, we even dated at one point briefly in 2019 but decided to remain friends afterwards and we did. He moved to another city during COVID and we catch up from time to time on the phone, it’s all good vibes, I wouldn’t call him a super close friend anymore but someone I care about and love to catch up with. We maybe send a few texts in between phone calls or send a song link. I got engaged last summer and we set a date for August 2026, yippee!! anyway, a couple months after getting engaged, this friend and I were having a catch-up phone call, the first one in like a year, and I mentioned that I’m getting married.

At this point we were trying to keep the guest list as small as we could and really only inviting mutual friends OR personal childhood best friends. So he was not on our list, as he and my fiancé have never met and we don’t really see each other all that often, but it was news I wanted to share with him nonetheless as I do consider him someone who would be genuinely happy for me. He expressed congratulations, and then he asked if I was inviting friends from our college (which is where I know him from…I don’t really talk to the other college friends much at all other than to share big life updates), and I explained about the small guest list but that I really want to get together with him and our college friends sometime soon to celebrate and so that they can all meet my fiancé.

He got kind of upset, pretended to brush it off, and then out of the blue turned it into a conversation on how we need to work on our friendship and that I don’t respond to his texts enough. He doesn’t really text me all that often, and I scrolled back through our texts and only saw a couple casual “hey!” texts of his over the last year or two that I forgot to reply to or answered some days after sent (which is common for me). I felt like it was a weird shift but I apologized that I had made him feel like I’m not doing enough in our friendship, this was the first I was hearing about it, but that I would make more of an effort on my end. All in all the phone call ended on a really weird note and I was left feeling confused and kinda guilt-tripped.

Over the next few weeks our guest list started growing as we realized there were people who had longterm partners that they’d want to bring, and friends we really wanted the other to meet, and we kinda just abandoned our small guest list and embraced it being a little bigger than we imagined. I thought about it and decided to extend an invitation to my friend, as now that we were in the mindset of a less-tiny wedding I genuinely did want him there, and at this point I had brushed off the weird phone call. He thanked me for the invite, and then asked for a plus one.

It felt like another odd thing, but we were also giving plus-ones to guests who wouldn’t know anyone else at the wedding (most of our mutual friends are from the same large circle and there are only a few friends outside of it so we felt plus-ones for them would be fair) and so I said yes, that’s fine, he can bring a friend since he’ll kinda just know me and a couple of my friends he met in passing years ago.

Fast forward another few weeks, we are addressing invitations and I texted him something like confirming his address or seeing if there is a name we can put down for his plus-one, something logistical that I can’t remember. He replies that he actually has a trip around that time and can’t come.

Ok….darn but whatever. My fiancé and I have a trip planned to California and we will be passing through his city for a few days and we already had a previous plan in place to meet up / he can meet my fiancé, so we just stick with that plan. It’s great to see him, we actually hang out with him and some other friends from that city for a few days in a row and it’s a really good time. At one point my fiancé and I get lunch with just him and I casually ask about his trip (the one that overlaps with the wedding), and he says it got moved to a couple months earlier. Oh….ok! I say that if he is able to then he should totally still come to the wedding, I even give him the physical invitation we had made for him, say no pressure, and I leave it at that. i can’t recall what his reply was, but something like “I’ll try!”

Trip ends, time goes by, our RSVP deadline passes and I’m reaching out to the stragglers who haven’t RSVP’d yet (he’s one of them). He leaves me on read. it’s his bday a few days later and I text Happy bday, which he does reply to with ”thanks!!”

it’s pretty clear that he either can’t or doesn’t want to come to our wedding, that’s fine. 0 butthurt feelings here. More than that I feel confused about our friendship, the same one that he complained I wasn’t doing enough in. I think our initial guest list boundary was super fair and his response on the phone wasn’t great but I did sympathize and once we entered a larger guest list zone I truly did want him there. This was the same for other guests who we might not have included for an intimate quieter wedding but would definitely include for something more celebration/party/reunion centered.

I haven’t known him to be an overly sensitive guy but I’m wondering if he felt like all my gestures to include him after that phone call were out of guilt, and so chose not to come/respond out of pride? It really doesn’t seem like him, he’s usually a down-with-whatever kind of guy, but maybe things have changed since we were living in the same city and hanging out all the time years ago. I should also mention that he and his 4-year girlfriend broke up last year so maybe he was struggling with going to a wedding in the aftermath of that?

I want to stay friends, we have great memories together and it was so fun to see him this year after so much time had gone by, and this is not his typical behavior as I have known him to be. I’m not sure if I should text again after he left my RSVP check-in text on read. It’s been weird! I am thinking about sending him a text asking if we’re okay, just not sure how much effort to put into making things feel normal again when he’s being kinda shifty and unresponsive.

[F29]for the last couple of months I have had increasing knee concerns (started with pain in my knees while jogging, but I stopped jogging alltogether and it had continued), and now even just going for a walk makes me want to cry because my knees feel very weak and I get localized pain in different spots a couple times a day. I am laying in bed now with a pillow under my knees and they feel so stiff and pop-y. I am not a sedentary person, I love to move and go for walks and hikes, and my wedding +backpacking honeymoon is coming up in a couple months so I’m really feeling some dread over what this all could mean and how much it might affect my life. I don’t currently have insurance but really want to see a PT somehow. i originally thought it was an injury from jogging but it’s equal pain/stiffness in both knees so now that feels unlikely. if anyone has any advice or is able to tell me if this sounds like osteoarthritis I would really appreciate it!

hello! I’m getting married in 2 months and wanted to start prepping so that I feel really confident on the day-of. Mainly because I get these bouts of very little sleep for days at a time (usually due to travel or anticipation of something) and I just know that the week leading up to my wedding I will be so so exhausted and most likely sleepless. I have had insomnia on and off for my whole life, I’ve seen 3 doctors for it and tried many many remedies, so it won’t be something I fix by then and I have decided to just roll with it for this event. During these sleep-less periods my skin gets duller, my eyes are less bright and I get dark circles under them, my hair feels greasier… and I just don’t feel my best. To anyone out there who also deals with this and was able to still feel beautiful and fresh/bright on their big day, can you pass along any tips/tricks? I don’t really wear makeup ever but am planning to wear a little bit for the ceremony, namely an under-eye concealer and maybe some highlighter to add some brightness, so suggestions with those too are appreciated!