It also will make your house smell great! I’d also suggest making enough for friends and visitors.

I’m in Chicago and it can get lonely if you decide to stay couped up in your house for too long. Make sure to be intentional on inviting friends over and becoming close with your neighbors. I noticed comments here are focused on the physical aspect of winter, but it’s also important to take care of your mental health.

My theory is the Midwestern kindness is just a regional Stockholm syndrome. We’re all in this together.

So you spent the day outside shoveling snow, maybe you had to walk 20 minutes to get to a friend’s house, maybe the cold itself just took it out of you because your body was burning calories just to stay warm. You finally get home and you are out of breath and just wanting to dry off and get warm again- and that’s when you thank your past self for what you did on meal prep Sunday:

French onion soup.

You can look online for recipes, but here’s what I improvised last Sunday (probably not definition french onion soup, but at least a variation on a theme). Mine takes about 1 hour to make (10 min prep, 50ish minutes to cook)

Ingredients:

• 1/4 cup butter
• 1 tablespoon fat (I use leftover bacon grease)
• Onions (I used 4 but you could do more)
• garlic (I used 1 bulb, but you could always do more)
• Apple (I used 1, but you could always do more)
• veggies (I like zucchini and carrots)
• mushrooms if you like em
• protein (stew beef, ground meat, chicken, turkey, hell even sandwich meat will do)
• cardamom
• Curry powder
• vinegar (I use white balsamic, but apple cider vinegar or anything flavorful will do)
• chicken broth

1. Cut up the onions into thick chunks, no need to get precise, just hack 'em quick so you have less time being in a tearful agony
2. Peel the bulb of garlic, but leave the cloves whole- don’t crush them.
3. Heat up your butter and fat, then add in the onions and garlic. Let it sautee for like… 30 minutes? If you have time to do a proper caramelizing then do that, but it’s still good if you want to make it faster.
4. While the onions and garlic do their thing, prepare your meat in another pan. Of course if you use ham or something pre cooked you can skip this step.
5. Slice your apple(s) however you want, I like thin slices but cubes are good too.
6. Add in veg and apples, let them cook for 15 minutes or so
7. Add meat
8. A couple dashes of cardamom and curry and also pour in your broth to desired consistency
9. Give a taste then add a dash of vinegar to see how it really cuts through the fattiness

Dish and serve! If you want to really clog those arteries, go ahead and add some cheese on top, I like smoked Gouda. I also use a pipe sweater to torch the cheese and give it a little melty/ crispy texture. This soup should be thick and hearty to restore your energy and give you the gumption to brave the elements again. If you were link in legend of Zelda, you’re getting at least 10 yellow hearts from this.

That and a hot tody will give you the coziness that will lift your spirits in the dark cold months.

Good luck!

Yep, be the change you want to see in the world.

Also, making communities is fun! I made [email protected] and it is booming thanks to several lemmings who I got to post consistently. Shout out to thepiccardmanuever.

I lurker is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to.

Also props to you for making such silly maps! Honored to have you as a fellow mod of [email protected] !

It was interesting because everyone thought she wasn’t hungry and kept giving solutions for that, but it wasn’t that she wasn’t hungry- she kept pawing at me and walking over to the kitchen/ her food bowl, but just wouldn’t eat what I gave her. She was very hungry, but I guess she was pickier than she was hungry.

As you hear the words “goodnight sweet prince”, you take your final bite of the Däz.

Thats what I’m talkin’ about.

And I bet this time you recieved blood before you got them

Obligatory OP comment:

I’d probably drink PBR Xtra and the Cookies and Cream ice cream from Aldi all day and then croak.

I’m digging myself out of a $13k credit card debt hole. I burned through my savings when a job that I had ended on my unexpectedly, and because it was contract work I wouldn’t qualify for benefits. They kept me around as a sub, promising me a full time position if I just stuck around long enough and I was foolish enough to believe them.

I’m self employed now and making do with the best I can, but I’m planning on ending my dream as a musician/ teacher and moving home. I don’t know who would want my skills, but I know they are specialized and strong. I just gotta see what kind of work would value them.

Thanks so much for your kind words.

I’ve taught at a private school as a long term music sub, which while being the job that put me in the red (I kept asking when the normal teacher would come back, they never gave me a straight answer until I walked into my office one day to find her stuff there. After that they kept stringing me along in hopes that they’d start a full band program- I spent weeks putting together a proposal for it to be rejected for “various reasons”).

I’ve been thinking about the regular job, but I have no idea what I can do to get me out of the red. Anything that would pay $80k+ just seems out of reach since those tend to be senior positions or for people who can code. I’ve tried coding many times but just can’t seem to get it. Sales has burned me time after time and marketing just doesn’t stick. I can do it for myself alright, but it’s just not something that wants me around in the corporate setting.

Sadly so much of the music industry is for creating commercial music to be used for businesses. When music is a commodity to be bought and sold, humans aren’t really necessary. Why would I pay a human to create a catchy tune for my advertisement when Ai can pump out something that does just fine? AI is also breaking the music tech side. It’s not 100% yet, but Ai mixing and mastering is taking off. If I’m an artist, especially one on a tight budget, an Ai mixer could do just fine for my album when normally I might pay someone with the experience to do so. This might seem great for the artist, but once they have their album, they can get paid $20 a year from Spotify.

The tech spokespeople keep trying to convince us that Ai won’t steal our work and livelyhoods. The thing is everyone in my industry, me included, don’t buy it. These are the same people who said tech would bring Seattle jobs and prosperity, but all it did was raise rents and push out the artists. Tech bros will disagree and say Seattle is just fine, but they weren’t the ones negatively impacted by the industry that allowed them to move there. There’s a group of us in Chicago who call ourselves Seattle’s artistic refugees.

We aren’t the only ones- San Francisco, Boston, Austin, Denver- so many cities are losing their artistic communities that made them worth living in. There’s still music in these places, but you’ll notice those performances are taken by big names for people who can afford those $60+ tickets.

Hell, even Death Cab for Cutie wrote an absolutely heartbreaking bop.

Digging for gold in my neighborhood

For what they say is the greater good

But all I see is a long goodbye

A requiem for a skyline

💔💔💔

I’m not trying to be doom and gloom, but I can’t keep living like this.

I love you. Thank you for commenting and being.

Yea, I think it went off the rails as soon as broad generalisations were used as to predict the motives of the sex worker. People go into sex work for many different reasons, and that is an important thing to know when piecing together the advice given.

If you do this before work, we call it “The Sandman’s Gamble”

And let him have that cake? No way- she should have her cake and eat it too.

I looked it up and a block in Chicago (where I live) is between 100 to 600 meters.

Chicago and New York have similar walkability, at least in my experience.

Nearest Grocery Store is 1.2 km (0.8miles) away from me, I usually take my bike to go shopping

Nearest park is like… 50 feet from me (15meters) but I happen to live right next to a park.

Nearest cornerstore is 300 meters

Nearest train station is 600 meters

Nearest library is 800 meters

To add some more,

Nearest bar is 400 meters away

I’m a musician, within 1km of me there are 4 open mics I can go to

Nearest theater is the Music Box which is 1.2 km away

Nearest baseball stadium is 1 km away

God I love Chicago

So I dealt with this a shit ton in my 20s, and have only recently found an effective way to reframe my mindset.

First, my friend introduced me to parts theory. It’s a practice that’s underscored by “nonessentialism” for my philosophy friends here (i.e. there is no single you, you are made up of many, many identities that come together). The exercise I would recommend you do is to name the different parts of you. Hell, to make it fun, pretend they are tarot cards or something. For instance my negative feelings came from a part of me I now call “the sleezy politician” who manipulates people into doing what he wants. I also took note of the origin story of this character- I had very unstable family dynamics that had a lot of backroom conversations, and also I had a traumatic friend group explosion in highschool that taught me I need to control others through charm to survive.

I also have “the musician”, “the teacher”, “the council”, “the romantic”, “the child”… I listed 34 and I could probably keep going. Recognize each one of these people is trying to take control of the wheel of your life, and you can choose who you give it too.

I also just listened to Kevin Hines on the Man Enough Podcast . The man enough podcast is a podcast that deals with men’s issues through a feminist lense- I see it as the antidote to the manosphere. That said, I don’t think you need to be a dude to take something from this. TW: it has a lot to do with suicide, but it is very uplifting when it comes to self love. The exercise I took away from it is to note the thoughts repeating in my head of who I tell myself I am, and then say the opposite. I am responsible. I am kind. I am genuine. I am honest. I am enough.

Finally I had a thought yesterday- I need to love myself before I love others. If I’m not comfortable in my own skin, how can I be comfortable with someone else? My friend who just got married said he knew she was the one when “the relaxed feeling I have when I’m alone at home is the same when I’m with her at home. I feel at home.” That’s when I realized I need to be at home with myself.

But don’t just love yourself- have a crush on yourself. Idk about you, but when I’m absolutely crushing on someone I’m seeing, I become like a bird of paradise. I keep my place clean. I exercise. I eat right. I take them out to dance and see the world. I do everything I can to be my best self for this person. So why not do that for me?

I hope some of this can help friend. You aren’t just wanted here, you are needed here, and for a reason.

I think this comment wasn’t supposed to be an argument for the existence of Israel, but rather directed at the initial premise. They are challenging the assumption that support for the Israeli state and support for the conflict in Gaza are one in the same.

I mean say what ya want but running with friends is great.

At least you thought it was.

Sam was just next to you a second ago, and then all of a sudden his heavy breathing went silent. You want to call out but the sound of gunfire silences you. You serpentine through the woods to try and avoid the bullets, but one grazes your shoulder. You keep sprinting as you hear the gun reloading. You come to a ravine as the trees get thicker. This is your chance to lose him. You zag along the stream for 50 feet and then run up to the wooded forest. You keep moving, never letting up. He who hesitates is dead.

In the clearing you find a shed- perhaps you can find something to hide under. You open the doors and you step back in horror. Sam was separated into 3 distinct pieces. Your heart drops as you see your friend, your brother in arms from the 22 battalion, lifeless in front of you. You go to leave the shed immediately, but when you go to open the door, it’s locked.

He found you.

You look to the shadows quickly to see where he is, but the shed is empty. You go back to the door but again, it won’t budge. As you go to the windows, you begin to smell gasoline seeping in under the floorboards, and then the sound of a match strike.

Within seconds the shed was ablaze. You begin to slam your boddy against the door- it needs to open. It must open. It starts to become hard to breathe, but you can’t stop. The flames are beginning to lick your clothes as you feel the burns developing on your body. You keep rushing the door until finally you hear the wood splinter. Your burned body breaks through the door, but you fall immediately to the ground. While the fresh cool air comes as a relief to the lungs, the bark, twigs, leaves and dirt tear through your fragile skin. You yell in pain as you roll over to see the shed collapse from its own weight as the flames consumed the rest of it.

There was no doubt now that Sam was dead.

But that thought quickly broke as you felt the heal of a boot come down on your chest. You look up into the barel of a shotgun, and behind it is who you feared the most. The one your father told you about every night in his ghost stories when you were a child. You thought he was just a myth, but there he was.

Shia LaBeouf

Also usually when I run with my sister I play music and we have a traveling dance party, it’s great!

Honestly, that’s the way to do it. Just dress right, but push through. It doesn’t matter if it’s cloudy, rainy, snowing, hailing- you RUN. You know you can’t stop. You have to find a way out. You pull out your phone to turn on the flashlight, but just as you get the flash to turn on, the At&t logo came up and your phone died. But in the flash you could swear you saw a barn in the distance, or at least something metallic. You keep moving towards it until you hear a car pull up. You didn’t realize there was a road so close by, but as the headlights scan across the trees, you see what you thought was a Barn.

The cold lifeless eyes of Sam gazed past you as you are forced to see what remained of him. He had bled out from the throat, and it was clear that an animal didn’t do this because the cut was clean and the knife used was pinning him into the tree. You shriek as the your friend who you knew since a child lay before you, but immediately find cover when you hear the car door slam shut. The light from the headlights stayed on as blades of light streamed past you into the forest beyond. You could hide in the shadows, but you don’t know if they saw you, so you decided to stay put while you hear footsteps stumble through the forest. The leaves are crunching around, but not in any particular direction so you might have a chance. You press yourself closely to the tree when you hear the footsteps stop. Any hope you had of hiding was done and you knew it. It’s time. Run.

You bolt out from the tree and run to the car that was still running. You hear an animalistic roar come from the thing that found you. You had a head start, and you are making the most of it. “Push push push” you tell yourself. You were a runner since a child and this is what you prepared for. You sprint to the car to find it’s a 1990s Ford pickup truck. There’s rust on the hood but the door is open. You get inside and close the door. The keys were left in the ignition so you slam reverse, turn around, and speed down the road.

You are driving as fast as you can as you hear the gravel popping and flying as you go. You look down at the fuel gauge and see that you are almost empty. You panic. Where are you going? You don’t know, you just know you are going AWAY. Your heart suddenly lifts as you see a freeway sign ahead. You head for it, when suddenly the rear window smashes open. In your panic you hit the gas more, but the road curved. You swerve to catch the turn but you over steer. You slam on the break but it’s too late. You see a tree flash in your headlights just as you smashed into it. Your head hits the steering wheel and you blackout for a moment, coming back dazed and confused, but you feel a hand at your throat. He had played the long game. He set the trap, and you took the bait. He waited for you every step of the way, and even when you pulled off the impossible, he still had you. Through the mashed window, the bloodied hand pulls you back out into the darkness. You finally get a good look. You heard the stories but you never wanted to believe them, but here he was, flesh and blood taking you to your death. Here he was.

Shia LaBeouf.

So basically you get to choose the kind of day you have, no matter the weather.