u/s7o0a0p

Trader Joe’s is a master of deception. The entire image of the company is that it’s supposed to be an upper-class, cool, hip grocery store that’s also healthy while being less expensive than Whole Foods. Meanwhile, the bulk of their products are frozen foods meant to be reheated quickly with fancy packaging. They create an allure of “we’re fancy and healthy” because they want to appeal to the young broke people who due to class anxieties don’t want to admit they’re broke and have no free time, so they make what’s basically a glorified 7/11 into a “premium” store. TJ’s entire image is based on classism from people unable to admit they’re working class.

If people would just be ok with being broke and not having time to cook due to being busy, they wouldn’t feel the need to make their convenience store shopping habits “premium.” People with class anxieties usually have health anxieties, and “convenience store frozen food” connotes bad health, so TJ’s gaslights people out of that worry by making their ultra-processed food “fancy.” If people just admitted it’s convenience store ultra-processed food to themselves, they wouldn’t be able to cope with their class anxieties.

In short, Trader Joe’s is living a lie.

I have a family of diabetes. I’ve lost a lot of weight (over 120 lbs) to try to reduce my risk of developing diabetes. Today I had my annual bloodwork. For some reason I can’t fathom, my A1c wasn’t a standard part of this. My previous A1c was 5.4 in January. My blood glucose came back as 108, and the doctor now wants a follow-up A1c test because that’s above 100.

I wondered if I should fast before the tests, but decided against it because I didn’t want to “pass out” after the blood was drawn or whatever. I deeply regret this now. Is a reading of 108 about 3 to 3.5 hours after eating concerning? I had a medium sized plate of chickpea pasta with olive oil, two roasted red peppers, roasted garlic, Parmesan, and a latte with whole milk. I suspect the sugar in the milk and the peppers could’ve caused this.

I’ve seen guidance on blood sugar levels 2 hours after eating and 8+ hours, but not much after 3. Is 108 bad 3 to 3.5 hours after eating? I suppose the only way to know is to measure it again after 8 hours of not eating and to get the A1c done, but I’m just curious about how worried I should be.

It’s kinda like Angine de Poitrine opening for King Gizzard in 2026.

Here you are, a big garage rock fan enamored by 12 Bar Bruise. You love that rough garage rock sound and can’t wait to hear it again on King Gizzard’s second album! You start playing Eyes Like the Sky, and…

“Why are they talking?! That’s so annoying!”

“I’m just not into this style. This band is washed!”

“They should just stick to their garage rock sound. This spaghetti western stuff isn’t for them.”

“They need to get back to making real music.”

“I’m a big spaghetti western fan and this is terrible.”

Yeah, I’m sure everyone was super dismissive and critical of the band when they veered into a wildly different sound for their second album. I’m glad they never did that again and just stuck to their garage rock roots!

In your completely subjective experience, is the new iteration of Absolute Bagels as good as or better than the gem that the old Absolute Bagels was? Or is it a shell of its former self usurping the old name? I’ll be visiting in a few weeks and I’d love to have a pre health department shutdown quality Absolute bagel.

You ever listen to Gizz on shuffle and just get the most wild transition? I just got Rats in the Sky into Tezeta, and it was really bizarre, but not even remotely the most bizarre one I’ve had. I think once I got Most of What I Like into Hell and it broke my brain for a moment.

Is Candles about Beowulf the cat knocking over the candle and starting the PetroDragonic Apocalypse?

I’ve lurked on this sub for a while, and I’ve noticed that the recommendations and opinions here seem to be heavily-skewed towards places in the U.S.

I myself live in Boston, and I completely get how it’s wildly easier to move domestically. From that angle, I completely get tailoring advice to moving to different U.S. places. What’s more puzzling to me is, I suppose, some of the very proud and very, inflexible, let’s say, America-centric beliefs I’ve seen on here.

Here’s one: some people want to live car free and actively hate even the idea of driving a car. The good news is that I have plenty of American friends living in US cities who both feel this way and live completely car free with fulfilling lives. It’s possible to do in the US, but the sad and unavoidable truth is that only a small subset of American places make this possible.

Thus my surprise when a list supposedly saying the “best” places to live in the U.S. didn’t consider car free living at all, and…that people strongly defend that? I’m sorry, but an ardent defense of completely car centric living is a remarkably unworldly perspective to have. Every human settlement for thousands of years had to be walkable by design, and almost every human society until about only 80 years ago didn’t have the personal wealth and infrastructure to have cars be the default mode of transit (the U.S. and Canada being exceptions where it’s been more like 100 years). Many places didn’t have the wealth for car travel until like 50 years ago, and many still don’t. Not only that, but the vast majority of currently inhabited human settlements were built well before cars were a default, and the places like this are often American suburbs outside the northeast and Great Lakes and much of Canada and Australia. From a historical perspective, completely car centric living, with most pedestrian and transit trips being close to impossible, is an *extreme* oddity. Talk to most Europeans or East Asians about whether they’d live somewhere where they couldn’t walk to any business and see what they say.

So yeah, a bit of a rant, but, are a plurality of people in this sub so against the idea of living car free that they won’t even accept that some people see car free places as the proverbial “greener grass”? I hope not. I’ve seen very good takes on here about walkable American places, and even though nowhere on this sub says it’s explicitly US focused, I’d like to think the idea of car free living isn’t seen as weird or something one needs to “grow up” from.

Stop asking.