Excessive apologies can feel disingenuous and perfunctory. That makes it difficult for me to know when an apology is genuine. That erodes my trust.

Excessive apologies can signal to me that the other person sees me as a threat, and I don’t want to feel like a threat, so I feel attacked.

But I could also choose to interpret excessive apologies as a sign of past trauma, so I could choose to have compassion and patiently ask the other person to talk to me about what’s going on. I can share how I feel and hope that they feel ready to discuss what’s happening for them. Patience would be key.

What’s normal is that you had a traumatic experience, then internalized a Survival Rule to avoid repeating the behavior that led to the trauma. Depending on your age when the original incident happened, the Survival Rule might sit very deep, causing you to follow it even without thinking and without knowing why.

All that is normal: expected, sensible, reasonable.

The rule itself might no longer be needed. Can you imagine a situation in which it would be perfectly fine to interpret as a joke something that someone says without specifying it as a joke? Can you imagine three? Ten?

Now it depends whether you mean actual DEI or the nonsense that companies do in the name of DEI or the unfortunate overreaction that some people support related to DEI due to the resistance to actual, reasonable, sensible DEI.

“… regardless of all other factors…” sounds like the second of these.

Obligatory mention of lazygit for those who prefer vi and its descendants.

No, I’m not making any claim regarding which is better. Hold your cards and letters. In many other universes, I’m a daily user of magit.

Not constantly changing things until there is something significant to release is a path to the stability that I value. Meantime, packages run and the system works.

I never wanted a hobby, but rather an operating system. I’ve been using Pop! for over six years. I only had one stretch where I felt like I was chasing annoying bugs and I don’t remember it clearly enough to remember how long it lasted.

Ceqli. http://ceqli.pbworks.com/w/page/5455970/FrontPage

Let me second this and emphasize the following:

• do anything
• do it whenever you have even the slightest impulse to do it
• do it for as long as you want to, even if it seems like no time at all
• do it for yourself

… then stop.

I don’t understand why such minced oaths are socially acceptable among people who don’t want to swear for religious reasons. Do they really not realize that they’re thinking “fuck” and effectively saying “fuck”?!

And what about the Catholics who take the position that a sin in thought is just as evil as a sin in deed?

Either say “fuck” or stop even thinking “fuck”. Anything in between is disingenuous bullshit.

To answer your question, no. I try to comply with folks who don’t want me to swear around their kids, but I volunteer to do that as a courtesy and can’t be coerced into it except by real force, such as threatening my physical safety or livelihood.

Excellent! I missed DaisyDisk. It looks great!

Forget IQ for a moment, for all the good reasons that other people have given you.

One of you will know more than the other or learn more easily than the other. That’s unavoidable. Even if the gap seems small, there might be key moments where the gap causes conflict. This is going to happen, whether it’s you or them who “is ahead”.

The question is this: how do you handle it?

If you treat each other with contempt, that’s a problem. That could be you assuming that they are always going to look down or you or them assuming that you’re not trying to “be better”. There are many ways for this kind do contempt to show itself in your relationship. Each of you has the responsibility to not think that way. Each of you has the responsibility for accepting and loving the other.

If you can’t learn to do that, then your relationship is doomed to fail. If you can learn to do that, then you stand a chance.

You both can choose.

Some things about my partner used to irritate me and I learned to accept them for the things they’ve tried to change but just can’t. That acceptance is key.

Good luck and peace.

Our naming convention was comic strip characters, hence Hobbes, Casper, and Quincy.

The second vowel is an unstressed “i”. In most varieties of English, since it is unstressed, we pronounce it as a schwa, which sounds roughly like “uh”.

If you’d like to articulate that syllable, like you might do in French, then pronounce it like the “i” in “sit”. That’s completely optional.

Yes, I’ve heard. And even when they were quite punctual, a difference of one minute was very noticeable and reliably commented on.

Germany has entered the chat.

You seem to be ready for either mindfulness meditation or Stoic philosophy. Neither one provides a quick fix, but the benefits accumulate over time.

I’m sorry that you’re going through this. I wish you peace.

False syllogism (you speak Chinese, so you’re an asshole) or maybe premature generalization (some Chinese speakers are assholes, therefore all Chinese speakers are assholes).

There is an implicit binary choice here, so “whether” fits. Both work, although I, for one, prefer to use “whether” for binary choices and “if” when there are more options. This is similar to my preference for “between” only for two things and “among” for more than two.

The phrase “I’m wondering if… can…” needs a noun or pronoun between “if” and “can”. As soon as you try to remove that (by moving it out to “The monkey who…”), the phrase stops being grammatical. We’d understand you, but it would require significant effort to parse the sentence. That seems to be what makes this sound strange, no matter what we try to do with it.

I don’t know whether other languages can do this, but English can’t.