I'm sure this has been asked here before. At first glance you would think folk, but they have some albums that sort of dip into atmospheric indie popish type "1975" vibey stuff (On The Corner Where You Live) so I don't really know.
It's been 5 years, N. 5 years since I broke things off. 5 years since you initiated no contact. 5 years since you made that playlist that's still on your profile.
I want desperately to reach out to you. Even though you live almost 400 miles away now, I would come to you for a face to face talk. I don't know that I would want to start things again with you, and we wouldn't be able to anyway considering the circumstances.
I've been thinking about the things you and I would talk about if you were to agree to meet me. I wouldn't want to reopen old wounds or try to make you feel bad for moving on. I would want to hear about what happened in your life since the last time we spoke.
How was senior year? How was college? Did you keep up with marching band? How was your first job? Do you still run or swim? How is half marathon training going? Do you still talk to any of our old friends? How did you meet your husband? What does he do for work? How's his family? How do you like where you're living? Is it much different? How is it to be close to the coast? Do you get along better with your parents now?
I want to know the boring parts of your life. I want to know that you're ok and that you're thriving. Most of all, I want to know you. What I have come to notice after all this time is that from my perspective, you might as well have died. And that's a hard pill to swallow because you were my best friend, and I don't think I grieved this breakup accordingly.
Sincerely,
A.
ps. I saw the playlist change. I know it's just a song name but I also know that's not a coincidence. The answer is yes, you just have to know where to find my new information. You have access to it.
It's been 5 years, N. 5 years since I broke things off. 5 years since you initiated no contact. 5 years since you made that playlist that's still on your profile.
I want desperately to reach out to you. Even though you live almost 400 miles away now, I would come to you for a face to face talk. I don't know that I would want to start things again with you, and we wouldn't be able to anyway considering the circumstances.
I've been thinking about the things you and I would talk about if you were to agree to meet me. I wouldn't want to reopen old wounds or try to make you feel bad for moving on. I would want to hear about what happened in your life since the last time we spoke.
How was senior year? How was college? Did you keep up with marching band? How was your first job? Do you still run or swim? How is half marathon training going? Do you still talk to any of our old friends? How did you meet your husband? What does he do for work? How's his family? How do you like where you're living? Is it much different? How is it to be close to the coast? Do you get along better with your parents now?
I want to know the boring parts of your life. I want to know that you're ok and that you're thriving. Most of all, I want to know you. What I have come to notice after all this time is that from my perspective, you might as well have died. And that's a hard pill to swallow because you were my best friend, and I don't think I grieved this breakup accordingly.
Sincerely,
A.
ps. I saw the playlist change. I know it's just a song name but I also know that's not a coincidence. The answer is yes, you just have to know where to find my new information. You have access to it.
For context, my high school sweetheart and I broke up amicably during my first year of college. To minimize the pain, we went no contact and eventually met other people and are now engaged to other people, but I thought this would be a useful post to make for those who are currently going through hell, because I know I did.
Firstly, and this may be a downer to some of you, but the pain only subsides. It never fully goes away. I don't know that to be universally true, but you shouldn't go into this expecting to fully get over it. You won't be absolutely miserable forever, but you will have moments of weakness. I probably have them once or twice every other month still to this day.
Second, and for the love of God, do not keep them on any - and mean ANY platform. You may think Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, etc, but my biggest problem app ended up being Spotify. My ex created a playlist for me right before we broke up and added a bunch of sad songs to it over the years, and she stopped adding to it in 2024. I have been returning to her Spotify account AT LEAST once a month ever since we broke up, and that has not helped this process at all. It led to me overanalyzing her listening habits and trying to interpret them, still today, in the context of a breakup that happened 5 years ago. No social media or any other platforms. Trust me, I know it feels good to check on them in the moment, but over time this will deteriorate your mental state and if you happen to be on a relationship and still do this, it makes you feel fucking awful, and understandably so. For those who are curious, yes, the playlist is still there and yes, I still overthink it.
There's a concept that I came to about two ish years ago that I don't think a lot of people understand about no contact, especially coming out of a long term relationship (3+ years). This is going to be blunt, but eventually you realize that this person might as well be dead in your life. This was someone who shared so much time with you, so much vulnerability, and in one moment they completely disappear. You can know that they are really alive, but there is no way for you to reach them without fucking up either their life or your own life or both. So in a sense, that's how you have to grieve. Don't treat it as if you only lost a relationship with a person. You need to grieve as if someone close to you has passed.
My last piece of advice is that I think it's ok to not be fully moved on before moving on. I think that you 100% have to go through the grieving process, but if you reach the acceptance phase and find your mind drifting towards that person every now and again, don't take that as a sign that you aren't sufficiently "moved on", because like I said at the beginning, it never truly goes away. The moments just get spread out more and the spirals tend to get shorter and more manageable.
I hope some of this helps. Please take care of yourself. I am fully aware of how much this shit hurts, but everything will be ok. It might not be great for a very long while, but it will get better. Sign up for a therapist, talk to your friends, do whatever you need to do to get it out. You got this!!
I (24M) am looking to relocate away from Delaware further up north. Ideally, I would want to live in Vermont, but I understand that the jobs are sparse and housing prices are out of control there right now. That said, I still want to be as close to Vermont as possible. I am thinking about the Albany, NY area.
The pros for me are immediately apparent in that I will be an hour away from Vermont/GMNF, two hours away from the Adirondacks, two and a half from NYC, and maybe three from Boston. Albany is better than Vermont for me because it is more likely to have higher job volume and those jobs are likely to pay higher than they would in Vermont. The housing is also pretty attractive in Albany from a price perspective, but I imagine that might be due to some places in Albany not being super desirable, but I don't know.
Another reason I would be making this compromise would be for my fiancee (23F). Her family lives down in southeastern PA and I think central/northern VT would be a little too far, but Albany is only like 4.5 hours away from the town her family is from, which I think is manageable. She is also currently in school to be a school counselor, and I feel like Albany could be a good place for that as well.
The cons are probably that Albany, like other upstate cities, has a lot of crime-related problems. I'm not overly concerned about this (I lived in/close to Wilmington, DE. IYKYK). I also have heard that NY taxes are something different, but again not the biggest concern for me on the whole.
Are there any other pros/cons I'm not thinking of? Is my reasoning stupid? Am I romanticizing something that doesn't deserve it? Thanks!!
I went to Washington DC for the first time since Donald Trump's reelection last weekend. I was absolutely flabbergasted by the amount of government buildings bearing his face. The Department of Justice. The Department of Labor. The Department of Agriculture. There were probably more that I am not remembering. These building have to my memory always had a banner of some president or another, but typically those were in memoriam of a significant leader within U.S. history, not an actively serving president (Roosevelt, Lincoln, etc).
I'm sure folks are also aware of his renaming of institutions to include his name, i.e. the Kennedy Center (rebranded The Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center) and the U.S. Institute of Peace (rebranded the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace).
It also seems that he is putting his face on national park passes, among other little things.
Is all of this not reminiscent of dictatorial societies where the leader's face is plastered all over the place? I think of N. Korea with Kim Jong Un, Syria with Bashar Al-Assad, etc? Not to mention his praise of "strongmen" like Putin, Xi, even Kim in some instances, leads one to believe that Trump is at least interested int he aesthetics of being a dictator, even if he can't legally become one.
Edit: I should have said that he is bound by the constitution, not necessarily US laws.
I make it a hobby to debate politics with people sometimes, and have consumed hours and hours of political debate commentary between both skilled debators as well as average joes. I can say with a relative degree of certainty that most Americans who claim to be anti-communist or anti-socialist have no idea what those words mean. Keyword being most. I know that there are people in this country who are anti-those things and are reasonably educated on the topic. They are in the minority.
In a lot of the debates that I have with people, I open up with the question, "what is socialism/communism" and they will answer something along the lines of "authoritarianism" and will not expand on it any further. They display absolutely no understanding of the terms.
This is not to say that if they learned what socialism/communist were that they would be convinced, but is more an argument that they don't have a fundamental understanding of what it is that they are opposed to.
Really loving this watch. It's not flashy and it's not a 'popular' model but I think it does what it's supposed to do.
Nobody likes looking at syllabi. They are practically just walls of text that professors make you look at once and then they probably end up trashed.
That being said, there is a lot of value in the information within a syllabus - it really just comes down to sifting through the noise.
I tried something this semester where I took all of my assignment + due dates and put them into a simple spreadsheet that organizes everything by week and shows what's coming next.
It ended up being way easier to keep track of everything, especially when assignments started piling up mid-semester.
You can do this by just copying down assignment names and due dates from your syllabi into a spreadsheet, and then sort by date. That said, it took a while for me to set up, and I only had 3 classes this past semester.
If anyone's feeling overwhelmed by their workload this coming semester, I wouldn't mind going through this process for you for cheap. Feel free to DM me and we can work it out. I can also send you a copy of my most recent semester's spreadsheet so that you can get a better idea of what I'm actually doing. No pressure at all!