Eras Tour, Vienna. So about… two years.

So, I’ll never get excited in advance ever again. Call me pathetic but it’s been months and I am still so upset it was just cancelled, erased, and forgotten about. I didn’t want to be greedy so I only planned for that show. I really wish I had been greedy.

Hands down my favorite part of interacting with multilingual/multicultural people.

My boss is Romanian, I’m american, we live in Norway, and speak English with one another at work (Norwegian to customers).

She uses the phrase “running around like a headless chicken” often and I’ll never tell her that I heard the longer “running around like a chicken with their head cut off” version of this, especially in the south, as a kid. I like hers more.

I am a US citizen but have been living abroad for the last 4.5 years. I can get by with Norwegian language but didn’t really feel hyper compelled to speak it all the time as English is spoken widely and well here. But especially since the inauguration it’s like, I don’t want strangers to realise that not only am I a foreigner, I’m an American. I try to be a good ambassador through my actions and words, but there’s only so much I can do to distance myself from broad brush strokes of “Americans” anymore and honestly is embarrassing. Also I feel deeply sad that I feel like I can never go home. That place just isn’t real anymore.

What shoe has these? I seek but I never find. Preferably that I can try on in Norway. So not Lems, unfortunately.

There is an amount of her assets and such that she couldn’t and shouldn’t be expected to give away. But she gave $1M to food pantries in each of the cities she toured the last 2 years and also gave millions in bonuses. And she probably didn’t feel any poorer. But I think because her dad was in finance and she started so young, many good business decisions were made so that her wealth just compounds no matter what she does.

It should be up to her and her team to allocate which charities and such she gives, sure.

But she’s an American billionaire, and is by design, not taxed as much as she should be, and that is the crux of the entire issue.

Chiming in to agree with you since for some reason you’re getting downvoted… no ethical billionaires. None.

I love Taylor Swift. A billionaire. She certainly gives a LOT back to others, the community ant large, etc. In many ways, I really believe we made the right person famous.

But there’s no justification for her to be a billionaire, she and all billionaires should be trying every day to lower their bottom line, not selling multiple copies of the same vinyl in different colors, as a small for instance.

One of the most stressful things about having kids is that it forces you to never un-know stuff like that.

I have one child, now adult, who reminds me every day that she didn’t ask to be born and wishes she hadn’t been. It’s hard to explain to someone without the life experience of it all but I couldn’t have known how shit the world was about to get when she was born (summer 2001) so it seemed like a good idea at the time. Every single day of her life has been hard both for her and us in various ways. And I wish the world was gentler for her.

Suffice to say, I can’t believe there are any people actively trying to bring new people in to the world right now. Shit has been bleak as fuck for decades and it gets worse every day. Even the new plague didn’t help. I feel bad enough knowing the world she was introduced to is so terrible but I didn’t know it was going to be. But now? Guys it’s actually very bad, how could you present this to a new innocent person like,”here’s life! Enjoy!” Pass.

I thought those things were true until like 2 months ago. I’m sad to have been proven wrong by millions.

Not yet, but we can test (language and civics) in about 3 years which we plan to do. We are currently “temporary residents” and renew every two years. My husband has a work visa to work in tech here, and I’m here tied to that visa through family reunification. We will apply for “permanent” residency (not citizenship yet) later this year.

Cost of living isn’t off by too terribly much haha. Our 2bd 1ba apartment is about half the cost that our 3bd 2ba duplex in Bay Area was. But we make substantially less. Also a hamburger, for reference, is routinely about $20 without fries, like for a Five Guys kind of burger. So we don’t eat out nearly as much. Healthier that way anyway. Lots of trade offs but ultimately it is the best and safest place I’ve ever lived.

You’re right, it is actually quite uncommon for Americans to live here without special circumstances. My husband is in tech, and managed to get hired on here, and so we are here on his work visa. We can test for citizenship after 7 years residency and testing language and civics, which we plan to do in about 3 years. We know that we are very lucky.

Nah, not crazy. In my view anyway. In 2020 I left nursing in CA making close to $100k and paid zero for actually amazing insurance… to work part time at a bakery for roughly $23/hr in Norway. I was 39.

Sometimes we just have enough and we don’t need to keep chasing the dollars in favor of a simpler, cozier life.

I totally agree, it’s alarming to see the projections of population growth. It seems unsustainable and I fear the consequences will be catastrophic. I think about this every time I see a news piece about declining birth rates or countries incentivising procreation.

The insulation alone with them and Hello Fresh had me hang them up for good after a couple tries. It was nice to try recipes I wouldn’t think to search online for but yeah, that packaging situation was god-awful.

But not gran’s, right?

You’re absolutely correct and I hate it. Good luck with the horrors ahead.

Up until the last week or so, I always used to say that even if I’m having a hard time, I am not ready to die. I want to see what happens next.

I no longer want to see what happens next, I see no good outcomes at all for the future of the world, not just the US.

The next time around. Sure, Jan. it’s over.

A dad point of view, while precious in delivery, doesn’t really translate very well in this scenario if you’re anything but a cis white male. The cis white men will be fine like they have been fine for thousands of years.