I have gotten pretty good at weaseling my way into in-groups despite being a queer socialist with strong opinions about human rights, unions, and civil rights. It took a lot of trial and error though.

I explained the concept of there being the two genders of “cis-male” and “political” to one of my professors at a religious university and he was actually interested to hear me out on it because he had never thought of it in that paradigm. I’m absolutely not saying that everyone can be convinced, but some people can be nudged in the right direction if you have a good rapport with them.

If the jewelery was given as a gift in good will, it would be worse to reject it or to accept it and never use it.

Not even a sip for me. I was offered small amounts of champagne or wine at special occasions, but I never drank any because I could smell the alcohol on it and didn’t want to.

I’ve just always been some variant of the “mom friend” and after I turned 21, I was still the DD most of the time.

Nope. The first time I drank any alcohol ever was on my 21st birthday. My Dad made me a gin and tonic with Bombay Sapphire, and that set the standard for the kind of alcohol I will drink. It’s a good thing I’m a lightweight because I only drink the expensive stuff. (The cheap crap burns too much.)

I’ve tried to drink coffee a couple times. I never was successful at it. My body just hates something in coffee and it just comes right back up before even hitting my stomach. So, I guess it’s gone down my esophagus, but never further than that.

I end up going to the ER way more than I want to. It’s really annoying; if you walk into an urgent care or a regular doctor’s office (besides my regular care providers, they’re used to me now) and say you think you have a kidney infection or other kidney problems and you just need antibiotics, they just go “NOPE” and yeet you out the door to go to the ER. So far, I have been successful in preventing them from calling an ambulance for me.

Never have I ever drank alcohol illegally or underage.

As an absurdly fervent Tolkien fan, people bringing up the Eagles spikes my blood pressure in a way that cannot be good in the long run.

My original idea was for the AI companies to shell out for building new nuclear plants, but bringing an old one back online is a step in the right direction. I don’t think the current “AI” projects are actually worth the resources they consume, but if they’re going to exist, their creators should be shelling out for non-fossil fuel options to power them.

This is exactly what I’ve been advocating for. Nuclear power, especially if they lift the restrictions on fuel recycling, is the cleanest option we have besides solar and wind, and it’s a technology that is fully developed and available now. Nuclear power is heavily regulated and is very safe these days, and is not reliant on rare earth metals like many solar panels still are.

I have done CPR on people before, and it is astonishingly brutal. To do it correctly, you have to cave their sternum in to be able to apply enough pressure to the heart to actually move blood around. For “Out of Hospital Cardiac Arrest” patients that receive bystander CPR, the survival to discharge is around 10%, give or take. The most common outcome of CPR (if it is successful and you get a pulse back) is days to weeks of dying slowly and painfully in the ICU. The older someone is, or the more health problems they have, the much lower the chance of recovery is.

CPR is absolutely reasonable for a younger person that stands a good chance of walking out of the hospital at the end of it, but 90 pound 90-year-old is extremely unlikely to survive in a meaningful way. It is very reasonable to request to not be put through that massive amount of suffering for a very low chance of any meaningful benefit.

There’s also degrees of DNR. There’s separate options for CPR, intubation, supportive care, active treatment, palliative care, etc. It’s a lot more nuanced than CPR yes/no in most situations.

The one my husband gave me is Nenya without the stones. It’s just the 6 petaled flower in white gold.

I got my husband an engagement watch. It’s an analog watch with a 24 hour dial, and it was very hard to find. He was delighted (especially since the ring he was getting made for me was delayed by about 4 months because of Covid)

I accidentally ended up at a religious university for medical school and you better believe I’ve gotten in numerous fights with the law and ethics professor (who, to be fair, is actually a MD/JD) regarding the prescribed conservative religious approach to the ethics discussions. I absolutely did not change his mind, but I did get a bunch of my classmates to start asking questions by putting myself out there and challenging the professor on their BS.

Edit: I should clarify that these fights were on mic in the recorded lectures, so there’s a hard record of my arguing with him.