NetHandle

There are always things people have in common. More-so today with the accessibility to media provided by the internet. That said being a friend to someone isn’t about checking a bingo card of similar interests. It’s about listening to their experiences and being interested.

What do people watch on tv, what are they listening to, where have they vacationed recently, did you hear about xyz happening in the news.
Kids. People with kids talk about their kids.

Some of that might overlap with your experiences, some of it won’t, it doesn’t need to. You just need to shoot the shit, hear what they’ve been up to, say what you’ve been up to, and enjoy doing it. Maybe do an activity of somekind while your at it, maybe just eat dinner.

The age range is just when people get busy with life and have less free time to actually do things. So they have less to talk about. Work becomes their lives. That changes eventually, wait another five year period. You get settled in your career and your focus shifts more towards what’s going on in your actual life.

You should look up ‘speech communities’. It’s a linguistic anthropology thing. Essentially boils down to ‘people talk differently and about different things depending who they’re talking to and where’. In your case you want a group of work friends to talk about work topics with, separate from your group of childhood friends, who you can talk about non-work topics with.

Oatmeal. Not exactly date night, but it’s hot and healthy.
Get large flake oats, not the instant stuff.
Boil 1 cup of water in a small pot.
Decrease heat to mid-low.
Add 1/2 cup oats. Stir only once.
Cook for 10 minutes,
let cool for 10 minutes,
eat for 10 minutes.

You’ll want to watch it closely for a minute or two after you add the oats to make sure it doesn’t boil over. If it looks like its going to boil over just remove the pot from the heat till it calms down, and decrease the heat a little maybe, every oven is diff. It still needs to simmer though.

You can season it with whatever you want after cooking it: maple syrup, milk, oat milk, brown sugar, chocolate chips, raisins or other dried fruits (if you do raisins add them to the water before the oatmeal), cinammon, apples… etc.
Maybe a small pinch of salt.

Vegetable sushi, no soy sauce though its made with garlic
Cut cucumber in long quarters
Make 2 cups dry rice
Mix together 1/4 cup brown sugar and 1/2 cup unseasoned rice vinegar
Add the mixture to the rice after it finishes cooking and while it’s still hot
Mix it in until it starts to get sticky
Get a small cup of room temp water
Take seaweed sheets and spread the rice thinly across it, leave ~2 cm at the end unriced (for sealing)
Lay the cucumber across the rice and roll it up, doing the uncovered end last. Use the water to moisten the 2cm stretch so that it sticks to the roll and seals it closed.
Cover and refrigerate them until they cool, cut and eat

You can top with toasted sesame seeds for added flavor.
Candied ginger is also nice.
Matchsticked carrots marinated in sugar and vinegar too.
You can get creative with the vegetable.
I like my wasabi in soy sauce so I won’t suggest it.

Edit:
I should also mention that different rice will have different results. Cal-rose rice works well. Basmati rice not well.

To be fair, as a cis white male, I use cis white male as a slur quite regularly. Right up there with dusty white folk.

If a slur is simply ‘to talk about disparaginly or negatively’ then that is exactly how I was using it and I don’t regret it. (I got the definition from the second definition of the google first result but from duckduckgo not google.)

Does making the negative generalizations about cis white folk like myself make me a bad person? Probably. Is it going to stop me? Probably not.

It certainly isn’t stopping them from dropping N-bombs, or other slurs. Talking shit about people who are just trying to live their lives. Interfering with people who just want to fucking exist in peace.

Am I stooping down to their level? Certainly.
Do they deserve it? Yes.
Should I be bothered that I’m not taking the high road? Not turning the other cheek? No.
These fucks aren’t going to learn unless you slap them in the goddamn face with it. Bigotry hurts. They deserve to hurt. Maybe they’ll learn, maybe we’ll learn. Maybe we won’t. At least it’s justice. I am a cis white male.

I have a label maker. It was a good investment. It ran out of ink. I need to invest in more ink so I can make more labels. I’m currently a little sad that I can’t make more labels because I don’t have ink in my label maker. I like the idea that the labels I made make others happy. I want other people to be happy.