?

This:

"I'm sorry if I'm getting a bit excessive, but is there anything going on right now that you'd feel comfortable sharing? You've been really hard to get ahold of lately, and I'm wondering if there's a specific reason."

Say this is a close friend of several years, and they've been really busy over the past few months. They have only responded to your text messages once in the past month, saying they'll text you that night - but they never follow through. Does the above message sound more reasonable in this context?

This does not refer to men who you don't know. I'm talking about a man you're well acquainted with, and who you already know is attracted to you.

Alright, I'll do my best to keep this brief. This woman and I have been talking for the past three months, since the beginning of January. She reached out to me on OkCupid, and we pretty much instantly hit it off - exchanged cell numbers and talked pretty regularly from that point on. She said that she didn't feel ready for a relationship with anyone at that point, but that she'd like to maintain some sort of friendship with me because we both suffer from depression and social anxiety; she felt like I was someone with whom she could relate. I thought our friendship was growing fairly close for the amount of time we had known each other, despite never having actually met in person.

Everything was going well until this past Tuesday. We added each other on Facebook and began communicating pretty much exclusively there. This is a screenshot of our last "conversation" (i.e. the record of our most recent messages dating back roughly a week or so), with the "Today" being Tuesday when I took this screenshot. The black dots are ellipses used to cut off large chunks of our past conversations, which date back to March 11:

http://i.imgur.com/vwt4MmM.png

She was in quite a bit of physical pain when she typed her most recent response, so that part made sense.

The last two messages were sent when I noticed that she was online at the time. She blocked me pretty much instantly after receiving them.

Is it reasonable for a guy to feel as if a woman is flirting with him if she refers to him as "boo" or "hun", asks him to help her buy a dress and cardigan online, enthusiastically details an outfit she's preparing for Thanksgiving dinner, uses a lot of emojis (especially ones like these: ♥️😘), and makes a joke about "if we ever get married"? Do you think it's inappropriate for somebody to do so if they're already in a committed relationship? If you were the guy, and you found out only after these interactions took place, would you feel insulted?

Are you ready?

Cheez whiz on chocolate ice cream.

What do you think?

Let's say you need to take a shower, but you're running late for whatever it is that you're going to. You don't really have time to step into the tub or stall, turn the water on, and do a thorough scrub.

So here's my idea: instead of showering, why not just use shampoo to clean yourself? Just slather it all over your body, face, and hair, then take a towel and wipe it all off.

Would that work?

"Only Mexicans can make authentic Mexican tacos. Even with exactly the right ingredients, white people just aren't capable of the care and consideration needed to make them properly."

Let's say you're eating out at an Indian restaurant. Assume that you're a white Caucasian, even if you're not, and that you're a huge fan of Indian food. You order butter chicken with saffron rice. When it gets to your table and you take a bite, you find yourself somewhat disgusted. Instead of the spicy flavour you're accustomed to having, you taste what amounts to simple tomato sauce with regular rice.

At first you just think that their recipe must be incredibly different from that of the other Indian restaurants you've eaten at. However, this place was recommended to you by your Punjabi friend, who said that it's the best butter chicken in the city. Confused, you decide to return a week later, this time with your Punjabi friend. You both order butter chicken, but when your plates arrive, you swap them to see if there's any difference. His butter chicken tastes like how butter chicken is supposed to taste, totally different from what you had before. However, when he tried yours, he agreed that it does taste different from what he's accustomed to having. The waiter comes around and you ask him why the two dishes are prepared differently from one another. This was his response:

"Usually with Caucasian patrons, we withhold the spices that are typical of our dishes because they might be more averse to the flavour as compared to our typical Indian customers, who are more apt to enjoy those spices because it's from their country of origin."

Is this racism?

Detailed here:

https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7772/17424554211_d1...

Note that no official diagnosis has been made.

"If you're dumb enough to major in something as useless as history, you practically deserve to be in financial ruin."

I find history fascinating. I spend hours at a time researching and analyzing events of the past, relating them to modern times, and developing a better understanding of how we as a species have evolved over the millenia from a sociopolitical standpoint. I would rather make decent money doing something I love than make a fortune at something I hate. Is this an unrealistic worldview?

For example, let's say someone is suffering from severe depression and social anxiety. They can't hold down a job because they carry themselves at a very slow pace and often don't show up on time, their eating habits are pretty disastrous (eating out on an almost daily basis), they never get out of the house, and they literally spend the majority of their time in bed. They never used to be this bad. When questioned about any of these things, they say that they flat-out don't care anymore, that their energy is completely gone, and they'll oftentimes throw the word "depression" into the sentence as a means of downplaying criticism. Do you feel that this person is simply making excuses for themselves, and needs to grow up? Or do you feel that they're being unfairly judged by those around them? I'm not specifically referring to myself, but to anyone who has depression and no longer feels enthusiastic about their life.

For as long as I can remember, I've had issues with self-esteem. I have always hated myself. And I don't mean that in a joking manner - I truly hated everything I was, and in many respects I still do. As an elementary school kid from ages 6-9, I would physically abuse myself, beating my arm until it bruised over. I would also bite myself so hard that it left a deep imprint in my skin. I would tell at myself, "bad boy!" "Shame on you!" "You're the son of the devil!" In late elementary, I blamed myself for things that I didn't even do, to the point where even my friends were concerned about me. Then around junior high and high school, I would have crushes on girls, and immediately shoot myself down by saying: "she's not interested in you that way." I'd walk up to them, confess my feelings, and then follow up by saying, "but it's alright, I know you're not interested in me that way."

Throughout that time and right through to the present day, I've considered my worth as a human being to be vacuous, of little or no tangible benefit to anyone else. If I ask for opinions on something and receive a broad range of responses, I always take the harshest criticism provided to be the most accurate and honest assessment of my original question. I say the following to myself on an almost daily basis:

• "You have no business calling yourself a decent human being."

• "No one would be on your side if they knew the full story. You're wrong."

• "You are the one with the problem."

I don't enjoy the company of my mother or her boyfriend. They aren't bad people, and from an objective standpoint, my living conditions are great. But being around either of them makes me feel incredibly depressed. Hearing my mother or her boyfriend coming into the driveway and opening the side door gives me this sickly feeling in my stomach. Hearing them outside my bedroom door throws me into this depressive state here I can barely muster the energy to move my body. I actually sleep through much of the day just to avoid having to interact with them, I never go on family outings, and I put off doing chores for them until the very last minute. I spend all of my time in my room, usually laying in bed. I don't know why I'm like this, and I don't know if this is something that most others experience. I'm almost 22 years old.

I was just watching a video of a police officer that went viral:

http://youtu.be/SGSrGmHsT8s

And the reaction to his tone and diction has been almost universally negative. But the fact is, the officer was in the wrong to begin with. What if, for example, it was a parent talking that way to their teenage son who was learning to drive after he forgot to signal when he was making a turn at a traffic light? Or a teacher talking to a high school student who failed to complete his homework in a timely manner? Or maybe it's an employer dealing with a worker who lagged behind everyone else when they were trying to get things done in a timely manner.

Would this sort of reaction have been more justifiable in those situations?

"If you've ever heard the phrase 'can't you take a joke', you've been verbally abused."

I just recently found out that not only have I maxed out my credit card, but I actually went $26.00 over the $750 limit. The moment I became aware of this, I immediately transferred $60.00 into my credit card account; the payments usually take a few days to process. Within a week or two from now, I will receive a cheque that will allow me to pay off the balance in full (I would never go anywhere near the credit limit if I were unable to pay it back in the very near future). This is the first time I have ever maxed out my credit card, the first time I went over the limit, and I'm scared of the consequences that this could have for me down the road. I've never been late making a payment, and I'm extremely cautious about paying off the balance in as timely a manner as possible. I have had a credit card since December 2013.

Here are my questions:

1) How severely will this past month's high balance impact my credit rating in the long run?

2) Will paying back the entire balance within the next couple of weeks serve to repair the damage done in its entirety?

Let's say a young adult in his early 20s wanted to rent out a studio apartment for himself; he can afford to do so and would desperately like to live alone. His parents have made it clear that he will not be allowed to rent an apartment in a bad neighbourhood, and that they need to be notified of the rental location before he goes through with any agreement. Problem is, they reject every single property he shows them, even the ones located in neighbourhoods with low crime rates. He asks them to find a place they'd be satisfied with, so they recommend an apartment in a supposedly "safe" neighbourhood (which in actuality has a higher crime rate than some of the places his parents have rejected), with a rent that amounts to around 60-70% of his total income.

He decides to take the initiative by renting a property without telling his parents until a couple weeks before he's scheduled to move in. It's in an area with a very low crime rate, and the rent is cheap. When his parents found out, they told him to cancel the agreement, saying it was in a bad neighbourhood with a lot of drug addicts and prostitutes. He refuses, and so his dad actually calls the landlord to cancel for him. He is sternly warned against doing that again.

Is this fair?

The main antagonist of my story is a dictator who combines aspects of Nazi Germany with North Korea to create a regime unparalleled in its sadism. Some examples of things that he has done include the following:

-Massive war crimes committed before he even came to power as a means of terrorizing his opponents - massacres against Kindergarten students, brutally torturing toddlers in front of their parents using tactics such as flaying or strychnine poisoning, bludgeoning innocent people to death on the street for no reason, etc.

-A very vivid description of his eight year old daughter (born out of rape, with her mother a long-term sex slave) being forced to perform fellatio on him, recording it on video, and distributing the footage to prisoners of conscience as a warning to whoever would dare oppose him - "this is what I can do to my own daughter, I can easily do the same to yours."

-Forcibly rounding up anyone and everyone that is diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, an intellectual disability, or anything else that would make ordinary cognitive functioning difficult, and using these individuals for human experimentation or putting them down to harvest their organs.

-Using entire cities with >1,000,000 inhabitants as testing grounds for chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons tests.

-Threatening to nuke whole cities of any country that attempts to intervene, and then carrying out these threats after action is taken.