I found this to be an interesting question.

I don’t think of myself in terms like that. I’m American (as in United States of). If people ask where I’m from, I’d say Pennsylvania.

If asked what I am, in terms of what countries my ancestors came from, I would typically just list my four grandparents. Since that encompasses four different European countries, it’s too complicated to think of myself as a hyphenated American. Maybe you’re in that situation.

Ultimately, the label is yours, so you get to decide. No one else’s opinion matters. It’s your identity. Just say what feels right to you.

Ah, but is a chicken egg a chicken egg because it came out of a chicken or because a chicken comes out of it?

That is the real question.

I was doing IT 30 years ago.

Back then you’d post a question on USENET and get an answer back from the guy who wrote the program you were asking about.

My go to.

Scribbled on the whiteboard in the office.

jk

You’ve got the right plan, but I just want to share some stories.

My recommendation is always to avoid adding a new cat to a cat household unless it happens during a move when no cat has a claim on territory.

1. My oldest had a cat. After a few months in their apartment they decided to add another cat. They followed a plan very similar to yours. New cat wanted to be friends. Old cat wanted to paint the walls in the blood of the new cat. They tried for months to get them to coexist, but they would separate them as soon as they started fighting.

After many, many months of the two cats essentially living separately in the apartment, they finally accepted that they would have to let the cats fight it out. It was distressing, and there were some minor injuries, but they’ve settled down.

2. Middle child and his fiancee had a cat (disabled: deformed back legs, walks on his ankles with the feet flopping around). They decided to add two more cats. One was missing an eye. The other was missing an eye and an ear. They wanted to give the best life possible to rescue cats that were otherwise screwed.

They again followed a similar plan. The old cat smelled the new cats in the room where they were segregated, and absolutely lost his shit. They ended up fighting under the closed door, and tearing up a 3 foot by 10 inch section of (brand new) carpeting at the doorway trying to kill each other. Bye bye security deposit. Any time they tried to carefully let the cats interact, the was nothing but attempted murder.

They moved to a new apartment, and nearly all violence ceased immediately. There’s still the occasional cat behavior where one decides to slap a brother, but it’s more like normal sibling behavior than attempted murder.

3. Many years ago a co-worker had a cat and she was asked to take on a new cat. I have no idea what process she followed to introduce them, but there was absolutely no violence. The cats didn’t fight at all.

However, her old cat was not happy with the situation and blamed her. He started peeing everywhere: on the floors, on her bed, on her clothes. If you think cats aren’t vindictive and capable of hitting you where it hurts, consider this: he climbed up onto the counter, straddled her toaster, and peed into it.

She ended up getting a prescription for kitty Prozac for the cat, which helped, but did not eliminate the behavior.

When the old cat eventually died, she had to tear out and replace the floors in her house too get rid of the cat piss smell.

4. My wife and I had a cat, and when we moved we decided to add a second. There really wasn’t time for the old cat to establish the new house as his before r added the second.

There were no problems except our old cat was old and lazy and the new cat was young and wanted to play. It was distressing for the old cat until one day when he was able to realize that I wasn’t going to do anything if he decided to beat the shit out of her. From then on if she decided to mess with him, he’d just give her a good beat down and then they’d be ok until the next time she decided to try her luck.

There was a hint for her behavior, as she was surrendered to the shelter because “she didn’t get along with and older cat”. At her first vet visit, the doctor noticed a healed fracture in one of her legs. So, in her previous home she pissed off an older cat who didn’t practice as much restraint as ours.

Scissors are the ideal utensil for correcting unseparated pizza slices.

…ignoring that going from disabled to average would feel like gaining superpowers.

I believe that computer just attracts people who are outcasts

I think you’re right, but I’ve also read that there might be some correlation between being trans and being on the autism spectrum. If that’s true, then it is reasonable to expect a higher than average percentage of IT people would be trans.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9014767/#%3A~%3Atext=(2020)+found+that+that+transgender%2Cand+sex+assigned+at+birth).

“You don’t come here for the hunting, do you?”

I will say a proud (if dismayed) moment for me as a parent was being forced to see the text’s between my daughter and the boy she was interested in.

Context: they were both 15, and the boy’s parents were religious wack-jobs. The father specifically said that 15 was too young to have a relationship. I had to respectfully disagree, since my wife was 15 when we started dating (I was 16).

Of course, the parents monitored all the boys communications, and would send me crap i didn’t want to see.

In the texts the boy suggested that he and my daughter should lie to the parents. My daughter pointed out that there’s no way we wouldn’t know.

She knew that we considered lying to be the one unforgivable sin. So she wouldn’t waste it ;-)

Thankfully, that relationship died. It would have been a whole lot easier to let it alone, but his parents couldn’t.

I’ve heard that when the boy went to college he couldn’t handle the freedom and ended up dropping out and returning home.

That depends on the situation. If you don’t know them, then yeah, you’d need to confirm you’re taking to the right person.

I ended up meeting all the parents of my kids’ friends, so it would have been beyond difficult to fake that.

Said this in a reply to another comment, but I wanted to make a top level reply as well.

I’ve been in this situation.

My recommendation is to tell your son he has to have Tiffany ask one of her parents to give you a call.

You don’t want to initiate the call in case they don’t know and are nut jobs.

However, you want to hear them say they are ok (and what they are ok with) in case they don’t know and are nut jobs.

Establishing a relationship with her parents will help when it comes time to decide which grandparents are going to cover which babysitting shifts ;-)

Just kidding about that last part. Kind of.

I’ve been in this situation.

I wouldn’t initiate a conversation with her parents, but I would insist that they give me a call.

I would want to hear it from them. If they did give permission, I would want to find out what their expectations are.

Asking to hear from Tiffany’s parents also gets around the possibility that they think Tiffany is actually spending the night at Amber’s house.

Nuke it from orbit.

It’s the only way to be sure.

Well, Americans are nothing if not terribly uneducated.

I guess I’d recommend watching Banshee.

In the years before the US existed, when the land was colonized by European powers, Europe had a lot of really annoying, prudish types who were a major downer.

Someone had the bright idea to encourage them to move to the colonies where they could live their prudish existence free from the naked bodies of Europe.

We ended up with all of Europe’s biggest prudes. Europe’s prudes have been trying to reestablish themselves, but they are at a serious disadvantage. Meanwhile, we in America have to deal with an overwhelming population of prudes that we’ve struggled for centuries to extinguish​.

While we’re on the subject, Europe also found it convenient to dump their criminals here. So we end up with a culture in which full frontal nudity is unacceptable, but gun violence is just fun entertainment.

I say that as someone who loves some good violence. Nothing quite so enjoyable as living vicariously through some bad ass beating the snot out of the bad guys in a movie.

I never would have thought of myself as a prude, but recently stopped watching the series Banshee because the amount of gratuitous sex in the show was exceeding the amount of gratuitous violence to such a degree that I began to feel uncomfortable.

I work at a hospital.

In IT.

For Radiology.

You don’t have to convince me to hate Siemens.

Like watching two high school bullies fight each other.