Weekend Open Thread

112 Comments

1. i didn’t see a 9/11 thread on the morning post – can we have a memory thread here? where were you, what did you see, what do you remember, what stories from that day have resonated with you?

   1. This makes me uncomfortable.

      1. Of course it does. But we’ve agreed to never forget, our comfort-level be damned.

         1. It feels performative. Why can’t our memories and grief stay private?

            1. Yours can. Reading here isn’t mandatory! Feel free to close the tab anytime.

            2. I mean, we don’t need to know all the mundane things the commenters did. If you want to do a book club reading of “The Looming Tower” that would be a better contribution of honoring the memory of the day than this.

            3. 3:02 so those of us who lived through history should… go read a book instead of remembering together?

               wtaf

            4. Absolutely nobody wants to hear your thoughts on The Looming Tower. Nobody.

            5. This. One of my team members is all maudlin about 9/11 today and won’t stop talking about it. Guys, she was 5 when it happened. My memories are much starker, and although I have indeed not forgotten, I don’t need to publicly rehash the nightmare or tell people where I was that day.

            6. Let people feel their feelings however they want. Her being sad isn’t hurting you. Don’t be a narcissist.

      2. If it makes you uncomfortable, then I suggest you collapse the thread and stay off social media today. Some people process trauma by re-telling the story of the day over and over again to create a narrative they can live with.

         1. You’re literally describing how trauma therapy works. Talking about traumatic events is a normal, healthy human experience!

            1. Nope. Don’t come to a fashion blog for trauma therapy.

   2. I was in DC, blocks from the White House, living in Arlington. I feel that younger people who just know this from the news years later often don’t appreciate how horrifying it was for us in addition to the events in NYC.

      1. My college bff lived pretty close to the White House and she was one of the first calls I made that connected. I was so relieved she was OK – there were all sorts of reports flying around about stuff happening in DC.

      2. I was driving from San Francisco to San Jose for an appearance in federal district court and heard about it in real time on NPR. They had no closed the court yet, but the judge came out and called it one of the darkest days in US history. Shortly after, they closed the courthouse. I drove back and realized that everything was shut down, including my firm. Even though we were so far from the chaos, it was eerie and felt so consequential. But moments after that felt so unifying and patriotic.

   3. i was also in DC. my autistic son woke me up at 6:30 this morning to talk about it – that was my first memory too, that it was just chaos. no one knew what was happening but it didn’t seem good. phone lines were down. in DC i swear to god it was unannounced martial law, i remember men in suits, wiht huge guns, on top of the supreme court building and library of congress.

      a friend who worked near the WTC was outside the building when the first plane hit, he said the force was enough to throw everyone to the ground. i can’t imagine what that level of chaos must have been.

      1. Same. My firm had an office in the south tower. Pure fear and chaos. I was happy to have had sneakers in my desk because we wore suits and hose and heels.

         That morning the sky was so perfectly blue. NPR wondered if Michael Jordan would be playing again.

   4. I was on the school bus on the West Coast and misinformation was flying back and forth. Our teacher was crying by the time we got to school. I’m still worried about the long-term health effects of the smoke and toxic chemical inhalation for all the immediate victims and first responders – it’s gotten some attention but not enough.

   5. I was a senior in college and spent the entire morning frantically calling my NYC based family to try to locate them. The news shared the advice to have everyone in NY call out of town family members to say they were safe as the local landlines were overloaded and you couldn’t get through. We got in touch with relatives who lived in Philly and they spread the word that everyone was ok. My friends were all checking in via AIM. There was such horror on campus and then I recall feeling a bit like a zoo animal as native NY’ers (and I imagine native DC residents) were reacting entirely differently vs. everyone else. I was told to take any extra time I needed on assignments and was treated with kid gloves that entire semester. The flight went down in the Rockaways about two months later, which was almost as horrific since so many first responders lived there.
      I (and every other woman I know) kept a pair of sneakers at my desk once I started working. Our companies all made sure we knew our rally points and where the stairs were. Nobody blew off fire drills in big office buildings, it was taken very seriously for a long time. That’s also why the 2003 blackout was so peaceful – people genuinely believed it was another terrorist attack and were practically giddy that it wasn’t.

      1. My spouse was one of the out-of-town people who were deputized to call relatives that day, he said it was one of the weirdest, scariest things he’s every done (calling complete strangers to tell them a relative was alive).

      2. I was living at home after graduating from college. Because many went to NYC for work, a bunch of us ended up calling friends’ parents around the country because we couldn’t reach our friends.

   6. I read this every year on 9/11. Happy birthday Don:
      https://tomatonation.com/stories-true-and-otherwise/for-thou-art-with-us/

   7. I was a freshman in college and my college was near an air force base so fighter jets were flying over campus all morning long. I saw the news as I was getting ready to leave my house for class. Our teachers were very compassionate and let everyone talk about how scared they were (a bunch of 18-year-olds away from home for the first time!). A little later in the day the university canceled classes.

   8. I remember sitting on the floor of my first solo apartment, frantically emailing friends who lived in NYC because the phones weren’t working. My dad was actually based at the Pentagon at the time, but I knew he was in CA on a work trip so I wasn’t worried about him in particular. It was so quiet in LA, and so sad.

   9. Mine is inconsequential, but it really reminds me of how shocking it felt.

      I was in college and had a late start. I would usually put on headline news while I ate breakfast, but for some reason, put on the Mary Tyler Moore show on TV Land (it was a particularly funny one, with Rhoda’s mother). My husband’s aunt called, and said “are you watching TV?”, I said yes, assuming she just meant she could hear it, and she said something about how she guesses we won’t be flying for a while. I sort of “mmhmmed,” having no idea what she was talking about. She’d just been traveling a lot for work, so I thought maybe she was calling to let us know she was done with the travel and hung up, thinking it was a weird call, but maybe she was just jet lagged. MTM ended; I flipped on the news and left the room, catching a glance at smoke and thinking it was another forest fire story. As I came back in, I heard the announcer say smoke was still billowing over Manhattan, and that’s when I stopped.

   10. I remember worrying about my parents, who worked in downtown Chicago. At the time, we didn’t know what was a target. It felt like anything could be next.

   11. I am/was in greater Boston. 11th grade social justice class when the principal came over the loudspeaker to tell us – it must have been after the second plane at that point, that it warranted an announcement and it no longer presented as a tragic accident. I vividly remember sitting in my history class later that day with the lights off and the radio on, just listening. It was surreal.

       We also watched one of the towers fall live. I went to an all-girls catholic school and the attached convent had a TV connected to the news stations. We were otherwise never allowed over there but a science teacher brought us in to catch a glimpse of some of the live feed. As it fell, we froze, but then I think the adults maybe questioned whether or not they should have shown us a TV and hurried us away.

       I also remember my dad, who worked in Boston and on a top floor of the Hancock tower, came to pick us up from school and drive home because, first, they evacuated the towers in Boston for fear of additional attacks, and second, there was a fear of just total chaos erupting so parents came and escorted their otherwise independent/self-driving kids home. I think it wasn’t until I saw my dad ~2:30 on a Tuesday picking me up from school (when I drove myself!) that I was like… ok, what exactly is happening here…

   12. I lived in Crystal City. I was getting ready for work and heard it on the radio, turned on the tv and watched in horror for a bit as I got ready but eventually thought “this is horrible but I have to get to work” so drove to my job in Maryland. Heard all kinds of rumors and chaos on the radio as I drove (bombs in the Capitol! The USA Today building is on fire!) and when I got to work everyone was just crowded around one tv we could find, and emailing some friends, and trying to call a few…eventually everyone left work but we weren’t sure we could get home so holed up at a friend’s place in NW DC for most of the day, with my friends trying to contact their friends and family in NY. Drove home through empty streets at night spooked seeing police cards and guards everywhere, and could smell the smoke from the pentagon in our apartment. It was freaky.

   13. I was in a radiology lecture in my 4th year of medical school. We turned on a television and watched as the buildings collapsed just after so many first responders had entered them. Just devastating. Our hospitals were on alert in Boston for transfers. We all knew that the debris everywhere was toxic with asbestos, and saw most of the first responders and people caught in the dust filled air with no masks. And for days, people weren’t wearing masks during the clean-up. We (doctors, medical students) all knew that years later all of the people exposed would start developing lung disease, cancers and more complications. Such a tragedy.

   14. I was a young professional working in western NY, hours from the city. I had many West Coast and international contacts, who I think just had a dim sense that we were based in New York.

       For days after, I had a stream of calls and emails from people I knew only distantly and professionally–just checking to make sure that we were okay and always asking personally about my family and friends. It’s hard to convey how kind people were during that time.

       Within the first few minutes, I remember my Irish colleague coming in and saying, “There’s been a great tragedy.” Yet we had really no idea what had happened. News websites were swamped and not functioning. We managed to get AP news through a midwestern paper online.

       It was a glorious golden fall day and unnaturally silent–no air traffic and hardly anyone on the roads.

   15. My dad was a mailman. They were still doing their sorting when the second plane hit but then were sent out to complete their routes. The trucks didn’t have radio and most didn’t have cell phones yet. So he just didn’t have a way to figure out what was going on until he was done his route.

       This is, of course, something my kids cannot comprehend.

   16. I was a high school kid in the Hudson Valley. My dad worked in emergency management and had to leave that afternoon to help with logistics for the response. I’ll always think of the terrified people who were going headlong into the chaos, as well as the terrified people who were trying to get out.

   17. I was a junior in college. I had a two hour block or an Econ class and we had a break between the hours. When we came back from the break, the professor broke the news. He was tearful. I didn’t really grasp the magnitude of what had happened. After class, I went to work (I worked at an office on campus) and it was pandemonium. Not long after, the entire campus was sent home. Cell phones didn’t work. We were glued to the tv.

   18. Tom Hanks narrates this and it is so good:

       https://youtu.be/18lsxFcDrjo?is=tAUhyc6DFAFpiSmn

   19. I was working in a hair salon on the upper west side of Manhattan and got to work just after the first plane hit. We didn’t have a tv in the salon, so we listened to the whole thing on the radio. Since the subways and roads were closed, we witnessed waves of people walking home from work. The first set showed up from midtown in the late morning, and people coming from downtown followed over the next few hours. Lots of people came into the salon just to talk about what was happening. A client who worked in the south tower showed up at 6 for his haircut appointment. He had been there when the parking garage was bombed, so when the first plane hit the north tower, he left immediately. He was eerily fine that night, but struggled emotionally over the next few months. A few weeks later another client no-showed, and I learned she had been killed when I called to try to reschedule her appointment.

       1. Today’s sky was just so so similar to the sky I remember from 25 years ago. That’s perhaps what hit me most this morning.
          It’s ok to stop and remember. Thank you all for sharing.

   20. Why dwell on this. Ugh.

       1. Seriously.

       2. I’m sorry, is your question why pause, reflect, and remember on the anniversary of a day that was quite literally pivotal for contemporary world history?

          1. It’s akin to trauma p0 rn. Collectively, we were much more impacted by the actions of our government in the years that followed.

             1. That’s exactly the point, at least for me. The attacks were shocking, and of course it’s terrible how many people died that day, but one of my strongest 9/11 memories is hearing the president say in his evening address, we will make no distinction between those who did this and the those who harbor them, and knowing we were going to war.

       3. Never forget*

          * by never, we mean max 25 years. Then shut up about it and stop dwelling.

          1. I mean, at what point do we move on? Take the lessons and try to make things better. Why wallow in the memories?

             1. I mean I guess some people think there is value in the historic record? Or in the memory of those who were there? Etc., etc.? I would be interested to hear from someone who was in Pearl Harbor or LA or really anywhere what December 6th was like when PH was attacked. I thought the Mad Men episode when Kennedy is shot was fascinating. We know the facts from history but not what those facts felt like for regular people. I think it’s interesting. You don’t have to. But the strong reactions are a surprise.

                FWIW, I was in NY that day and watched the whole thing happen on the morning news. It was one of the best weather days I can remember, just perfect weather, sunny, warm but not hot, not a cloud in the sky except for what hung over downtown for days. It smelled when you got below midtown like burnt plastic. The subways were messed up and over crowded for days after. There were missing persons flyers everywhere for weeks and months. It was so awful. But also so unifying in a way that I never experienced before or since. So many things were disrupted that people would just talk to each other. That weekend, I went upstate to get away and I just remember flags hung up everywhere on houses that normally displayed hippie peace signs and an impromptu, sincere candle light vigil in a Best Buy parking lot at the Kingston mall.

             2. Why do you feel like you’re the person to make that decision for others? Let people who want to talk about their memories talk about their memories without dismissing them as “wallowing.”

                Sorry that other people talking about their experience of 9/11 is so hard for you, but stop wallowing in your feelings and just log offline if it bugs you.

             3. Who is taking the lessons and trying to make things better exactly? (Certainly not either major political party in USA)

             4. There was an article in NYT last week about 20-somethings whose lives were shaped by 9/11, but they feel disconnected from it. That makes sense to me; this is the time interval when things don’t feel distant enough to be interesting as history, but you’re too young to have personal memories associated. (And if you’re particularly self-centered, it makes sense you’d want everyone else to shut up already because you don’t care.) Like I don’t have memories of the Berlin Wall falling because I was a young child, but it wasn’t so long ago that I was curious about it when I was 25. The older I get, though, and I think maybe *because* I have personal experience of a major historical event, the more curiosity I have about everyday people’s experience of “interesting times,” as my HS geopolitics teacher called them. He was approaching retirement, and told our class full of HS seniors in spring 2001 how lucky we were not to be living through interesting times. The curriculum of that class addressed terrorism, and he predicted the US would be “knocked off it’s perch” by a major terrorist attack, and I remember thinking Mr Klein was right on 9/11.

             5. “Who is taking the lessons and trying to make things better exactly? (Certainly not either major political party in USA)”

                God, this cynicism is tiresome and childish. Get offline. Your embrace of short form content is showing in the depth of your thoughts.

             6. I guess I’m not sure which lessonsof 9/11 are relevant for a political party?

       4. Why are you reading it if it bothers you so much? Exercise some agency and close out. Stop acting like you’re the victim here in a discussion of 9/11, FFS.

   21. I was a freshman in college at an upstate NY SLAC with a significant portion of the student body hailing from NYC. Everywhere people were crying and trying to get in touch with family in the city. My roommates had the news on our tiny dorm TV and I came back from a shower and watched one of the towers fall wearing nothing but a towel. I also remember TV carts being wheeled into the dining hall, common areas, basically everywhere there was an outlet. I spent the afternoon sitting by myself in the middle of the quad and journaling because I couldn’t stand the news coverage anymore. The guy I was dating was a volunteer firefighter in NJ, he left to go help and I never saw nor heard from him again. Not on 9/11, but I also have a distinct memory of one of my roommates (although not the one whose dad was an F-15 pilot) being oddly giddy announcing “we’re bombing Kabul!!” later.

       I left school after freshman year and enlisted in the military because I had no direction and felt like college was pointless at the time. I was trained as an Arabic linguist and served in the OIF/OEF era, the start of a career in intelligence…so yeah, I wasn’t near any of the planes, but it completely changed the trajectory of my life.

   22. My daughter and I talked about this today. It’s a little weird that it isn’t strictly taught in school; they have a moment of silence and it’s discussed in the broader context of terrorism, but these kids weren’t live then.

       I was a senior in high school in the NYC suburbs. My good friend was a freshman at NYU. My cousin worked at the Pentagon. Many of my classmates’ parents worked in NYC. My own dad had standing breakfast meetings at windows on the world every week. I watched the second tower get hit on live TV because teachers pulled everyone out of the hallway and into the closest classrooms with those TV-on-a-cart setups. Only some of my classmates had cell phones and nobody could reach their parents in the city. We had several people in our town, including the father of a classmate, who parked at the commuter rail and never came home. My dad lost many clients who he knew like colleagues that day. He left his job in NYC as a result of 9/11.

       All that said, I talked with my daughter about it as a major life memory for me but how I understand that the next generation feels removed from it- like I do about events like Kent State or Pearl Harbor. Interestingly, we live in another state now but a few years ago we had a lovely high school babysitter and it turns out her mom was on one of the hijacked planes. She was only a toddler when it happened.

       I visited ground zero as soon as it was allowed with a group of high school friends and we just stared into the holes on the other size of the construction fencing. I haven’t been to the museums and don’t really want to..

       1. I wasn’t born yet for Kent State or Pearl Harbor but don’t feel removed from them at all. To me they’re still living memory since so many people in my life were alive at the time. To me those events don’t feel much more removed than things that happened while I was alive but that didn’t affect me directly at the time; in both cases I hear the stories from people who were closer to the events.

   23. I was in law school, and the news started to spread between classes. By 11:00 the school had basically shut down. I remember how beautiful the weather was that day.
       It was a few days later that I found out one of my college friends had died in the WTC. She was one of the most energetic, ambitious people I’ve ever known.

   24. I was in the courthouse of my small SW Virginia city when a clerk told me about it after court. I thought not too much of it as I walked back to my office, where everyone was glued to the TV in the conference room. I had friends who lived up there, so I thought of them and was able to reach them and confirm they were ok. What was so significant to me on a personal level was that the preceding Saturday night (2.5 days before), I visited NYC for the first time, and my friends took me up to a bar on a high floor of the WTC. I had been only marginally aware of those buildings before we went there, and I remember looking down to the street, which seemed a million miles away. I remember getting money at the ATM downstairs and catching a glimpse of the mall beyond it. Ever since I have always been just so freaked out at how “close” to that danger I had been and how of all things on my first trip there that is where we went.

2. Am I off base here? I just called a the main number of law firm with me re than a dozen attorneys to settle a case and the person who picked up answered with “hello?” Like I cold called her personal phone. I thought I called the wrong number.

   Are we not longer answering with the firm name, or even here in NY, the very curt and grouchy “law firm”? Maybe literally no one calls? I rarely call but it would be really nice to not have this conversation in writing. I feel like a dinosaur but I’ll get with it if this is what we’re doing now.

   1. Haha, I’m sorry, I hate when this happens, too. Giving grace, it might have come through as a wierd internal number thing. Sometimes my phone will come through as Internal Cube 5534 or some nonsense like that and it catches people off guard.

   2. Sounds like the call got forwarded to someone who wasn’t expecting external calls. If it happens multiple times with the same firm and you have a good relationship with the lawyer you’re trying to reach, I’d mention it to them. There’s probably some IT glitch someone can easily fix. I wouldn’t mention a one-off though.

3. Found the cookbook, but it doesn’t have a Thai salad in it. Not sure how close it is, but if all else fails maybe have a look at PureWow website Thai Veggie Salad.

   1. don’t they sell their dressings in the store/website? what i’ve done in the past with salads is just try to make a general listing of what’s in there and quantities, the dressing is always the hardest part.

      https://www.cpkathome.com/product/thai/

   2. Try a “nam yum” dressing recipe.

4. Looking for a fall transitional jacket that is also relatively lightweight for travel. I’d like to wear a layer under and not too cropped (everything I like seems short). Not denim, not a puffer. Under $150 ideally approx. Any recs?

   1. Take a look at Lululemon Always Effortless jacket. Trending funnel neck, lightweight, water resistant (hidden hood) and $148

   2. Check Jolynne Shane’s blog. I think she has reviewed fall jackets recently. I know she posted about several today in regard to a travel wardrobe.

      1. I love her style but I don’t have her budget!

         1. I find her style so basic. Like she looks very put together (and Im sure at that price point the fabrics are luscious) but also… yawn. There’s just no personality there.

   3. Field jacket, à la Barbour? There are plenty of knock-offs, from Old Navy price on up.

      1. Barbour is not lightweight and makes me sweat. Anyone else? I swear my arms were always damp when I took mine off.

   4. Uniqlo. I have a couple.

   5. This is a little over your budget (still sub-$200), but I just bought the Daily Practice Trench Coat from Anthropologie and can’t wait for the weather to cool down so I can wear it!

5. Networking flake-outs…is it me? Am I the problem?

   In the past year, I have gotten a couple of networking requests that I’ve accepted (recent alums from my law school, young alums at my alma mater, friend-of-a-friend’s college-age daughter), then the other person has flaked out. Last minute rescheduling with a vague excuse, being stood up at a coffee shop after waiting for an hour, answering availability messages then no follow-up, etc.

   Being myself, I wonder if it’s just par for the course or if it has something to do with my profile/job/age. My job is steady and pretty well-paid, but it’s not the most glamorous or prestigious position. I’m a late GenX who is rarely part of hiring entry-level people, so I don’t have (and don’t give) super-current advice on how to succeed in the current job market. I’d like to think I’m a nice person who has some wisdom, but then again, I don’t have a successful self-help podcast. Even the young people who live in my house don’t take my advice! ;)

   I’m sure I made networking blunders as a young person, probably mostly being overeager, but I also remember being read the riot act by the career services people about being considerate when using the alum network.

   Should I just lower my expectations?

   1. I had informational interviews as a young grad and never once stood anyone up! That’s a mistake on their part.

   2. It’s them, not you. Trust me. It’s them.

      1. +1

   3. I would personally stop taking these requests unless you actually know the person.

   4. I have the impression that current university students are flakier in general than my generation was. I’m not saying that we were the pinnacle of responsibility or anything. But we definitely had some kind of fear or panic that made us show up (maybe today it makes them not show up… or even leave their dorm rooms at all some days?). It would be nice if today’s young people also don’t later get stress dreams about sleeping in and missing class!

   5. It’s not you. I’d probably only offer Zoom meetings in the future so if they blow it off, I haven’t gone out of my way to wait in a coffee shop. I hate flakes.

   6. Yikes! I see a lot of flake-outs on most commitments these days, but in this job market, it’s unbelievable to me that people would flake out on a one-to-one networking commitment. Unless this job market is so bad that they feel that networking is worthless and performative?

   7. They are the problem here, not you. (1) I only respond to these at all if it’s a thoughtful message, and (2) I do a call, so if they bail, I’m out no time.

6. total shot in the dark – does anyone here have experience with people who get really really emotional based on other things happening in the room? my 13-yo-son will, for example, see a fight break out and then that seems to send him into fight/flight mode. i’d love any recommended reading if anyone has anything to help me better understand it.

   1. Honestly, my son is nearly 15 and sometimes reacts this way. He’s empathetic by nature and I think the added teenage hormones have him off kilter. Kind of like the way my menopausal hormones have me off kilter. We are pretty much a quiet household though so I think seeing things like a fight or people shouting is so out of the norm that it’s a legit response.

   2. *autism*

      Also the concept of “highly sensitive people” aka HSP is junk pop science and not peer reviewed, the people who the concept and book were developed about were later diagnosed as autistic.

      1. yes my son is autistic. but not every autistic person acts like this. emotional contagion? not sure what words to google. it’s not so much empathy as a sensory reaction to what’s happening around him.

      2. HSP/empathic people are real. I know because I’ve been a poster on this board since 2010, and I’m a perfectly level-headed tax lawyer IRL, but I had a near death experience in 2014 and ever since then I can “read” people and sense things. You’re welcome to call me crazy, but I’m not autistic and it’s real as hell (and it took me a long time to learn to distinguish others’ emotions from my own).

         OP, take the woo-woo part for what you will, but you could look into empathic people a bit. Some grounding visualization techniques might help your son.

         1. I’m sorry you fell for the scam, perhaps look into a proper neuropsych evaluation that looks at trauma related PTSD and beyond.

            1. There are a lot of people who can tap into energy the rest of us can’t see. Similar to animals being alert to dangers before humans .

            2. There’s no scam here. The information was always there to be read.

            3. Hey, also survived a near death experience. I think what you’re describing is the heightened sense of awareness that comes after a sudden traumatic event.

               You say you can “read” people, but are you sure you’re reading them accurately? That’s what trauma does — it heightens your awareness but not necessarily your accuracy. And PTSD has a way of convincing you that you *are* accurately reading situations. But it can end up having you avoid things you perceive as risks that are in fact incredibly low risk.

         2. Lol

   3. Isn’t that just normal situational awareness plus basic self-preservation? If you see a fight breaking out, you get the eff out of there ASAP. Your instinct shouldn’t be to calmly grab a bag of popcorn and sit down to watch.

   4. I think becoming emotionally regulated is part of human development, so being 15 and not able to separate his self and well being from others’ chaos is natural. But I would read about regulation and help him understand how it works and how he can keep his emotional reaction separated from what others are experiencing.
      This might help, especially because even if the underlying issue is complex, one couldn’t get at what that is without some level of clarity/insight, which can be gained through regulation.
      That’s my best guess at least. Good luck – it is super hard work but those who can start young and guided by a loving parent are lucky.

      1. I think emotional regulation is tricky. There’s a fine line between repressing your emotions and expressing the emotions that need to be expressed—anger, sadness, joy. Not every situation warrants calm responses.

         1. There is a big difference between regulation and repression. Regulation is about identifying emotions and choosing what to express. I can’t think of a situation where regulation is not a positive.
            Repression is rarely if ever helpful.

      2. Agree. OP, do help your son learn to recognize his feelings and act (or not) on them in healthy ways. Please don’t feed into the notion that he is just so sensitive and empathic because he has outsized reactions to everything around him, when in reality it’s just him not having any self awareness or self control.

7. I was thinking about this the other day: is anyone still talking about Ayn Rand and the Fountainhead? I was a libertarian in my college years so maybe I just heard a lot about it then, but it feels like i haven’t heard it mentioned in a thousand years.

   1. It’s because the tea party hijacked Rand about a decade ago and those of us who are not crazy right wingers got too embarrassed to talk about it. I was also a libertarian in college and now practically a socialist, so as someone who used to be absolutely obsessed with Rand and everything she wrote, it’s been weird coming to terms with her beliefs, her legacy, and the current politics. I can love the books as stories and still recognize that her outlandish beliefs (being against environmentalism, for example) were products of her horrific childhood in Soviet Russia and not a road map for how the rest of the civilized world should act.

   2. I’m a high school librarian and we always have at least a few boys who ask about this title every year. Usually because it was recommended to them by their dad.

      1. I always thought Obama’s take on Rand was pretty astute: “Ayn Rand is one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18 and feeling misunderstood, we’d pick up. That’s a phase you’re supposed to outgrow.”

         I think it’s still pretty similar. But I also recently met a middle-aged man who named his dog Roark so some people never outgrow the books, I guess?

      2. I would LOVE to hear more about what it’s like to be a high school librarian right now!!!

   3. I read these in my early 20s. Ive always been far left but i needed to know what it was all about. I enjoyed them.

   4. I think a lot of teens like Ayn Rand and Ender’s Game, etc, but you realize most libertarians in circulation are white guys who like to talk at you. Then you start thinking more about why there aren’t any women in Galt’s Gulch, and are the “billionaire” guys really feeding and cleaning for themselves. Then you move between a few places and reflect on tax policy, road repair and public school funding even in the American West. And Northern Europe starts to look pretty good aside from the winters.

8. I’d like to add vintage and unique pieces of home decor to my home, especially wall decor, but don’t have time to browse antique shops. What are good online stores I can browse that have moderate (eg, $50-200) prices?

   1. I would start with Chairish. The prices may run higher, but it may help you figure out what you’re looking for elsewhere (etsy, ebay, craigslist, all with cautions).

      1. +1
         But I also will say as a huge collector of vintage and antiques, you really cannot replicate this online unless there’s something very specific you’re looking for. You need to see and touch the pieces. You’re better off just making a list of things you’d like and taking a weekend to go antiquing and finding things in person.

   2. I’d browse whatever you like, then go to FBMP once you have an idea of what you want to buy and the associated keywords. That’s going to be your most reasonable option.

      1. And consider how far you are willing to travel to pick up, then center FBMP on the wealthiest part of your geographical range. Or better yet, the “wealthy” area for antiques and the “rich” part for everything else. I have the utmost appreciation for the show-off rich part of my locale, because man those people regularly get rid of some nice stuff.

         1. Maybe. Rich people where I live seem to buy whole rooms from a store. I have better luck finding vintage pieces in older subdivisions like those that exist in PA.

   3. You may have local FB groups that will have higher-end things than FBMP generally. I am in a couple for my geographic area. One is a really-too-broad geographic area, and another is hyper-local, or is supposed to be. But I’ve never not eventually found what I wanted on FBMP.

   4. Etsy has a whole vintage section.

   5. Etsy- especially on that budget. You’ll get much more bang for your buck.
      Do you have any idea what you already like? Art, and if so, new or vintage? Don’t forget the cost of framing things. Textiles? Ceramics like vintage blue and white transferware?
      Wherever you do go, beware items that are new being sold as vintage.

   6. A lot of antique stores now have Facebook pages where they post things as they come in. I would look up some in your area. It’s perfectly normal for them to take payment over the phone. I have bought many pieces this way.

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